I have a confession to make. For the longest time, when I read about A/B testing, I thought it would be difficult. So I didn’t do it, even though I knew that A/B testing gives you the chance to optimize your website for conversions. But then I got the opportunity to review Visual Website Optimizer and found out that it wasn’t difficult to do at all. In this post, I’m going to take you through the steps of setting up a simple A/B testing campaign.
Click on any images throughout the post to get the full view.
Running an A/B Test
I decided to try Visual Website Optimizer on my freelance writing services website built on WordPress. Here are the steps I took to create my first test.
1. Installation of the Code
First, you need to add your website to your account and install the tracking code. I chose to do it manually.
But you can also choose to do it using plugins and integrations.
You then use their smart code checker to verify the code is installed. Once that is complete, you can move on to creating your first test.
2. Creating the Campaign
There are several types of testing campaigns you can choose from. I decided to go with the simple A/B test.
To set up an A/B test, you will enter the URL you want to test, along with any additional criteria, such as testing mobile users or users from specific traffic sources.
When you click next, you will be taken to the URL you are testing inside the Visual Website Optimizer editor. There, you will make changes to your page to test the original versus the variation. For my test, I wanted to see how well my freelance writing services page converted with and without the large block of topics. So I removed the sentence leading into the topics.
And I removed the two blocks of topics.
Once I was finished editing the variation page, I set up my two goals using URLs that visitors would land on after submitting my contact form or subscribing to my email list.
After the goals are entered, you will finalize your campaign details, integrate additional tools into the process (such as Google Analytics), and configure advanced settings such as campaign scheduling.
3. Measuring the Results
After a several days had passed, I went in to check the results of my campaign. The orange bar represents the original version of my freelance writing services page with the topics list, and the blue bar represents the variation without the topics list.
The results were also close for acquiring both new leads and mailing list subscribers.
You can also see a detailed report of how your pages performed compared to your goals.
Additional options include viewing your original page versus the variation and checking out heatmaps for both pages.
I went on to test a few more different variations for my freelance writing services page to determine which one worked best at converting new client leads. I plan to use this tool to optimize future versions or changes to my business and other landing pages.
Visual Website Optimizer Pricing and Features
Visual Website Optimizer is an affordable testing tool, starting at $9 per month for basic testing features.
It’s a highly scalable tool that works for everyone from bloggers to enterprise level companies.
Final Thoughts on Visual Website Optimizer
Visual Website Optimizer is a great tool to use to make A/B and multivariate testing easy to do on any website. Best of all, it will help you make changes that will help you convert visitors into leads, sales, and subscribers. Be sure to sign up for a free trial today and start testing ways to improve your website!