The Use Case for A/B Testing
A/B testing has endless possibilities to help customize your website for any given time to help test theories or questions you may have. It does this by allowing you to add a customized website to the same URL then choose how often you want each site to come up when navigated to the URL. This can be vital in collecting data without fully committing to the change in case it is negative and you have to start all over again. This type of test also makes it much easier to compare side by side for instance say Best Buy wanted to experiment during Cyber Monday. This gives a very short time frame in which having to switch the entire website half way through would be very costly and you could risk it being buggy and not functional which would be detrimental to a company during this time. By doing A/B testing you can set the two websites to 50/50 and get realtime data while not having any data askew due to high traffic times or any technical delays.
Applying These Uses
One way this can be used is by experimenting with navigation on your site. Take Nike as an example they have all of their main navigation links at the top of the page, maybe they want to see if they can get longer session time per user if they move the navigation to the side so it always shows no matter where on the page they go. With A/B testing they can make this change to the website and then make it a 50/50 ration. Then when they look at their data from Google analytics they can compare the avg. session time to see which site kept customers looking for longer.
