What is A/B Testing?
Have you ever wondered whether your website could perform better with certain changes? A well-performing website is essential to nearly every business nowadays. You don’t have to change your entire website and wait to see what happens, though. A/B testing is a process that allows you to change one small aspect or more at a time, and measure the difference in performance between the original and the change. With this form of testing, you can make educated guesses about what could improve your website’s performance, and get helpful data from user behavior.
How to Test a Hypothesis
Now that we know that A/B Testing is relatively easy to use, we can look into how to create and test a hypothesis. A hypothesis is an educated guess about something that you believe would improve the performance of your website. A couple examples of this could be: “I believe that changing the color of a button would increase the number of clicks”, or “I believe that putting a video at the top of a webpage, rather than halfway down, would increase the number of views”. Your hypothesis doesn’t have to include changing your entire website at once. Usually, making just a few small changes at a time is the easiest way of measuring the impact of those changes.
Once you determine what your hypothesis is, you can run a test using Google Optimize. This software lets you make changes to a website and easily measure the results. Once you make a change to test your hypothesis, you will be able to show that version to specific users based on a shared characteristic. For the hypothesis about moving a video to the top of a page, we could make the test audience anyone using Google Chrome as their browser. This way, anyone who is not in that group will still see the original version of your site, and will function as a control group. Once you determine how Optimize will measure the results and pick an objective for your experiment, your test is ready to run. After running the test for as long as you like, you can gather the information about your website’s performance and determine whether to make the change permanent.
In Summary…
All of these steps and more are summarized in this comprehensive article from Google. A/B Testing is a very helpful tool for improving your website, and can give you great insights into user behavior. By using this helpful tool, you can measure the impact of certain changes, and work towards your overall goals.