Have you ever wanted to test the importance of various elements that can be found on your web page, to see what your users find most helpful, and what they find not as interesting? Well, you have come to the right blog post! In this blog, I will talk about the importance of using an A/B test to test different variants on the same webpage, to make your user experience richer.
What Is An A/B Test?
You might wonder, what is an A/B test? Well, an A/B test is a randomized experiment where you can test different variants on the same site page to see which one is more effective among your users. So A/B testing is basically explained in the name of the experiment, variant A is considered the original version, and variant B is the modified version of A.
Anytime you are making an A/B test, you want to have a clear idea of what you want to test, and this is done by creating a hypothesis. Identify the changes that you think will better help you reach your end goal, and then conduct the experiment. At the end of the experiment, look at the resulting data to see if your hypothesis was correct and if changes really need to be implemented.
Example Situation: Page Format
Recently, I have noticed that one of my blogs is getting scrolled through only 2/3 of the way. I was able to identify user scroll depth from the tags that I created in Google Tag Manager (GTM), and you can check out the blog post that I recently wrote on GTM to learn more about it. I will attach a link to the blog post at the bottom of this blog! Now back to my situation. I want to know why people are not scrolling all of the way to the bottom, and I think that changing the blog format can fix the problem that I am having. I think that substituting in a video for one of my ending paragraphs in my original blog, will help increase scroll depth.
In my A/B test, variant A would consist of my original blog post, with the last third of the page all words, and variant B, will consist of the same blog post, but I will modify that last third of the page to consist of a video instead of a bunch of words. I think that implementing this change, I will be able to increase user interest in my blog. At the end of the day, I want to create and post content that my readers/users find interesting, not content that serves as a waste of space. So here is what my hypothesis would look like:
Hypothesis: Changing the blog format, by adding a video instead of a paragraph will increase scroll depth from 2/3 to 3/3 of the way.
What Can I Understand From The Data?
After my experiment is completed, I will be able to view my results and see if my hypothesis about the page format was correct or not. If I do find that my users found the video more attractive than the paragraph that I had originally at the bottom of my blog, I will make changes to my overall blog post to include a video. If my hypothesis is proved wrong, I will create another test and experiment with different formats until I find the best and most attractive format for my blog.
Where Can I Find My Data?
Checking your experiment results is super easy, you can either go into Google Optimize under the Reporting Tab and view your results, or you can access your results in Google Analytics through experiments, which can be found under the Behavior Reports Tab.
Here are the steps to creating a successful A/B test:
- Develop a hypothesis
- Create an experiment, and set it as A/B test
- Create variants
- Set objectives
- Set targeting
Below you can find a link to Google’s Help Guide that goes into more detail on how to create an A/B test:
https://support.google.com/optimize/answer/6211930?hl=en&ref_topic=6197696
Additional Resources:
My Blog On Google Tag Manager: