Digital marketing is all about effective customer service. That’s why it’s crucial to know what your customers like and what kind of user experience they want to get on your website.
“Ok, but what is my gain?” The formula is simple: the more convenient it is for users to make a purchase or another desired action, the higher your conversion rate is and the more benefits you get. It’s a win-win situation. And there is always room for enhancement. So, digital marketing is all about effective customer service.
“Ok, but how could I know what they like and what they don’t? To ask each of them?” No, but we can test their behavior and make some decisions based on the result. And that’s what A/B testing and MVT are for.
These methods let you ask visitors about changes on your website by offering them some options and measuring the impact. In fact, both A/B testing and MVT (multivariate testing) are the parts of the controlled experiment. Controlled by you. In both cases, you experiment with different versions of your web pages and show them to the different segments of your target audience. You can find out which version of the website performs better by collecting the data about your visitors’ engagement and analyzing it through the web analytics tool.
“Ok, what’s the difference between A/B testing and MVT?” Dealing with A/B testing, you have to change only one variable, whether it’s a headline or color of the button. The whole design of the website can serve as a variable too. But if you offer half of your customers a completely new version of the website, you’ll never know which particular changes have determined the result. So, A/B testing is the best option if you need to test one change at a time and define which of them has the desired effect on your visitors’ behavior. Using MVT, you can test different combinations of the elements and find that perfect ‘combo’ which performs the best. Of course, you can test as many combinations as you want, but remember that the amount of combinations defines the number of segments of your audience. So, in order not to get frustrated, be simple instead and test no more than 4-5 combinations.
Since you’ve understood the mechanics of these tests and what you can benefit from it, let’s have a look at the most frequently used testing tools.
No question, it’s the most powerful tool among the other A/B testing and MVT tools. However, it demands the powerful resources too.
The year of release: 2010
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Optimizely offers three plans for those who want to run a test: Standard, Professional and Premium. The Premium plan includes a complete A/B testing plan and has an option Pay As You Go. You have to pay monthly only for the number of unique visitors you test. A minimum price is $49 per 1,000 visitors. The information regarding pricing for other plans and functionality is available only on request.
You can sign up for a free 30-day trial period.
“The world’s easiest A/B and split testing optimizer”. In the opinion of VWO. Well, we’ll see.
The year of release: 2009
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As we’ve already said, you don’t need to pay separately for different features. The price of the whole package depends on the number of visitors you want to test. The minimum price is $49 per month when billed annually or $59 when paid month-to-month. This allows you to test 10,000 monthly visitors.
Other options:
30,000 monthly visitors – $129 or $155 month-to-month
100,000 monthly visitors – $249 or $299 month-to-month
200,000 monthly visitors – $500 or $600 month-to-month
300,000 monthly visitors – $729 or $875 month-to-month
You can sign up for a free 30-day trial period.
Google’s solution for A/B testing. The main difference between Google Optimize and the other tools is that the first one pairs with Google Analytics. Who can resist the temptation to have Google Optimize data in Google Analytics and Google Analytics data in Google Optimize?
The year of release:2016
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There’s no such thing for Google Optimize. Should I add it to the pros column?
That’s it. We can’t say one tool is better than another. It depends on how big your business is, how many resources you have and what the purpose of your experiment is. The usage of any of these tools for A/B testing (or MVT) is up to you. But if you still have questions why you should run these experiments, let’s go back to the school math class. Let’s assume that conversion rate of your website is 0.5% and revenue is $20000 per month. With the help of A/B testing and MVT you can easily find out how to create the better experiences for your visitors. And even if your conversion rate will increase from 0.5 to 0.6 %, your profit will reach $24000 per month. ‘Small’ change, real money. Isn’t that easy?
But if it’s not, our great team of the experienced consultants is always at your service. We use the best industry practices, so we can review your website and help you to:
Wish you high conversion rate and success in your business!