SpyreStudios

Web Design and Development Magazine

  • Design
  • Showcase
  • Inspirational
  • Tutorials
  • CSS
  • Resources
  • Tools
  • UX
  • More
    • Mobile
    • Usability
    • HTML5
    • Business
    • Freebies
    • Giveaway
    • About SpyreStudios
    • Advertise On SpyreStudios
    • Get In Touch With Us

Split A/B Testing Graphical Elements of Your Landing Pages: Best Practices to Test and Quantify Conversion Value of Landing Page Elements

July 5, 2017 by Spyre Studios

a/b testing landing page

It is a known fact that one of the best ways of generating high conversion rates is by having high-converting landing pages. Landing pages are standalone web pages with a single purpose – to act as a point of entry for a particular website.

Study has shown that designers have just 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression on a customer. With such little time available, selecting the right design for your marketing can often be the difference between increasing your bounce rate and gaining a new customer.

Related: Graphical Ideas That Add Trust Factor to Your Landing Pages

Ideally, as a designer, you want to make sure that the first page a user sees on your website converts into optimal success.

split a/b testing

Split A/B Testing for Landing Pages

According to Unbounce, “A/B testing is the act of running a simultaneous experiment between two or more pages to see which performs or converts the best”.

To begin an A/B testing, there need to be multiple designs created, amongst which ones will be selected for testing as you please.

According to John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing, “landing pages allow you to create a custom-tailored experience for your customers based on current marketing campaigns or targeting”.

He also has this to say about landing pages: “Today, landing pages have simply become a required element in the marketing toolbox for every imaginable business, including local brick and mortar types.”

There is always a difficulty in achieving a balance when it comes to designing landing pages. You have to decide between making data-driven decisions and using your intuition. Your decision should, however, be based on a fine balance of experience, gut instinct and personal opinion as well as data, which most people can find difficult to achieve.

Let’s assume you sell eggs and you normally put them in conventional paper egg crates. You sell an average of 50 crates a week. Then you hear about A/B testing and decide to try out other types of crates for the egg. You try bright coloured plastic crates, and discover you sold 200 crates the following week. This definitely means that the way you displayed the eggs attracted more customers, increasing your sales.

Split A/B Testing Best Practices

There’s no one size fits all when it comes to landing page design. However, there are some basic best practices and processes that increase your chances of making a winning one.

The following steps look at the best practices/processes for A/B testing of landing page elements.

a/b testing

Step 1: Collect Data

This involves taking a look at your site’s analytics and identifying high traffic areas, as well as pages with low conversion rates that need to be improved on. It is preferable to begin with high traffic pages as this will allow you gather data faster and you have more data to work with.

Step 2: Identify Goals

“Goals are the desired results of a process,” says Brendan Wilde, marketing manager at Umbrellar Cloud Hosting. “The goals set are the metrics which would determine which variation of an element is more successful than the other and works best for your site. Goals in this instance can exist in any form; for us at Umbrellar for example, our set goals could be the number of visitors to a landing page, or the number of enquiries and sign ups we get in a week.”

Step 3: Develop a Hypothesis

A hypothesis can be described as a prediction. Once you have identified the goals, it is necessary to come up with a hypothesis of why you think one approach will work better than the current one. Start by having a list of ideas you want to use for a new approach and prioritize them. It might take some research from you to come up with a list of ideas. You can also take a look at what other people are doing, to inspire you.

Step 4: Create Variations

This step comes after you have your hypothesis ready.

Create variations of the elements you want to test. Use an A/B testing tool to make changes to an element of your website or mobile app. Most of the best A/B testing tools have a visual editor, so you can easily make changes to the color of a button, hiding navigation elements, or custom made changes.

split a/b testing

Step 5: Run Experiments

Kickstart by launching your tests and wait for visitors to participate. As visitors come to your site or app, collect data about which variation or approach works best. Visitors’ interactions with each variation is collected, measured, and compared, giving an insight into what works best.

Step 6: Analyze Results

After you complete your experiment, the next action to take is to analyze the results from the test carried out. The A/B testing software will present the data from the experiment and show you how the two variations performed. If one variation performed much better than the other, you can switch your site or app over to the version that works best. You can continue iterating the experiment to improve your results.

Some elements you should consider testing:

  • The main headline: try a smaller headline versus a longer headline; no headline versus having one; different header style; font size; and positioning of the headline.
  • The Call to Action (CTA): text in a button, for example, ‘buy now’ versus ‘purchase item’; action of the button; shape and size of the button; changing the button position; and multiple call to action buttons versus a single call to action button.
  • Text block: Long versus short text; using bullet points versus normal text; SEO optimized versus human readable text; or no text at all.
  • Form testing: long versus short; and same page form versus multipage text.
  • Copy testing: Long copy versus short copy.
  • Pricing Strategies
  • Landing Page Image
  • Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
  • Sales Copy Text font
  • Style Page Layout and Design

Conclusion

A/B testing is not all about guess work but is rather a deliberate effort to understand user behaviour and why users react positively to results you receive from the experiment, leading to further improvement of your landing page design.

A/B testing is unique for its simplicity and availability of free tools, which if successfully used, will definitely improve your conversion rates.

This post was written by James Cummings, a business psychologist and serial entrepreneur, with over a decade working in finance, IT, marketing and recruitment sectors. He has authored numerous books in the management space and is Founder and CEO of www.dailyposts.co.uk.

Filed Under: Design, Ecommerce Tagged With: landing page, landing page design, split testing

Recent Posts

  • 31 Fresh Design Elements for Spring and Easter
  • 10 Templates for Music Concert Flyers
  • How to Build a Web Scraper Using Node.js
  • Best PHP Books, Courses and Tutorials in 2022
  • How to Get Your First Web Design Client

Archives

  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008

Categories

  • Accessibility
  • Android
  • Apps
  • Art
  • Article
  • Blogging
  • Books
  • Bootstrap
  • Business
  • CSS
  • Design
  • Development
  • Ecommerce
  • Fireworks
  • Flash
  • Freebies
  • Freelance
  • General
  • Giveaway
  • Graphic Design
  • HTML5
  • Icons
  • Illustrator
  • InDesign
  • Infographics
  • Inspirational
  • Interview
  • Jobs
  • jQuery
  • Learning
  • Logos
  • Matrix
  • Minimalism
  • Mobile
  • Motion Graphics
  • Music
  • News
  • Photoshop
  • PHP
  • Promoted
  • Rails
  • Resources
  • Showcase
  • Tools
  • Tutorial
  • Twitter
  • Typography
  • Uncategorized
  • Usability
  • UX
  • Wallpapers
  • Wireframing
  • WordPress
  • Work

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

SpyreStudios © 2022