Just before writing this article, I was shopping for some flower arrangements. In addition to looking at the prices of the various arrangements, I looked at which flowers were included in each arrangement and the measurements of each size so I could see exactly what I would be getting for my money with each option.
A/B testing in marketing is a lot like comparing your options to see which one will provide the biggest bang for your buck. If you’re creating your content yourself rather than hiring a professional, you might not be exchanging money for the content, but you are exchanging time and effort, and since we all want to get the most out of our time and effort, you need to know which content will drive the best results for your business. That’s where A/B testing in marketing can help.
Table of Contents
- What Is A/B Testing in Marketing?
- Why Should I Use A/B Testing in Marketing?
- How to Conduct A/B Testing in Marketing
- Use Your Results to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
- Rinse and Repeat
What Is A/B Testing in Marketing?
If you’re not already familiar with the concept, A/B testing in marketing (otherwise known as split testing) is when you take two pieces of marketing content and distribute them to two different segments of your target audience and see which one performs better.
Why Should I Use A/B Testing in Marketing?
There are several content marketing tools you can and should use to optimize your marketing content before you hit that “publish button” (some of them help you optimize before you even start writing), but for the most part, those tools can only give you general recommendations. For example, a headline analyzer can compare your headline to the kinds of headlines that tend to perform the best overall, but that doesn’t always predict the kinds of headlines that resonate with your target audience, whose members are bound to deviate from the average in at least some aspects.
How to Conduct A/B Testing in Marketing
Now that we know what A/B Testing in marketing is and why it’s such an important part of your content marketing strategy, let’s look at what it means to conduct a successful A/B marketing campaign.
Decide on Your Variables
If you conducted any science experiments in school or studied statistics, you should be familiar with the concept of controls and variables, and those rules apply to your A/B testing in marketing. That means you should have a list of variables you want to test, but you can’t test them all at once. For example, if you want to test two different headlines, two different banner images, two different formats for your blog post and/or two different lengths to see which gets the most engagement, you can’t test all those things in the same test because you won’t be able to tell which variable was influencing your target audience.
Instead, you’ll need to run one A/B campaign to test your headline, one to test your banner images, one to test your format for your content, another campaign to test for length, etc.
Identify Your Goal
Going back to science class, do you remember your teacher talking about independent variables vs dependent variables? Your independent variable is the one you’re manipulating, while the dependent variable is what changes when you change the independent variable. For example, changing your headline is going to have an impact on the number of people who click through to your website. The headline is the independent variable, while the click-through rate (CTR) is the dependent variable.
If your goal is to get a higher CTR, that’s your dependent variable and you should manipulate an independent variable that will affect your CTR, such as your headline. If, on the other hand, your goal is to increase engagement on your website, then you’ll want to play around with images, as well as the length and format of your content.
Create Your Competing Pieces of Content
Once you’ve identified your independent and dependent variables, it’s time to start creating your A/B campaign, which means you need to create two pieces of content, your “control” and your “challenger.”
A/B Testing Email Campaigns
How you go about creating your different pieces of content will depend on the type of A/B campaign you’re running. If you’re testing an email campaign, you’ll use your email marketing software to run the campaign. Most email marketing tools make it easy to set up and run an A/B campaign for your newsletter, but they do require payment, and depending on your email marketing tool and your subscription level, you might have to upgrade your subscription before you can run an A/B email campaign.
A/B Testing Paid Advertising Campaigns
If you use paid advertising to drive traffic to your website, Google Ads allows you to run two ads simultaneously so you can see which performs better. Once you have your winner, you can delete the other one and just pay to run the ad you know will drive the best results for your business.
A/B Testing Website Landing Pages
If you’re testing a landing page of your website, you’ll need to create a test page you can compare to the version that’s currently up on your site, which will be your control. Hubspot’s Marketing Hub is one option for creating a test version of your website.
Split Your Audience
Regardless of the type of content you’re testing, you need to make sure you’re splitting up your audience evenly and randomly. This means each campaign should go in front of the same number of people and members of your audience should be randomly assigned to a group. If the groups are split up by age, gender, location, or another variable, you won’t be able to determine how your content performs across your whole audience. Instead, you’ll just find out what a subset of your audience likes or dislikes.
Decide What Makes a Winner
Sometimes you test something and the results are too close to call. For example, if you conduct an A/B testing email campaign and Email A gets a 33% open rate while Email B gets a 34% open rate, that’s not enough of a difference to declare Email B the winner because the mood people were in when they saw your email in their inbox is enough to sway the results by at least one percentage point.
In statistics, the amount of difference required between two test results before one can be declared a “winner” is called statistical significance. If you never took a stats class, or if it’s been so long you’ve forgotten how to calculate for statistical significance, here’s a refresher course for you.
Give It Time
Depending on the type of A/B test you’re running, you might need to let it run for a while before you can collect your data, analyze the results, and declare a winner, especially if you’re testing two different versions of a landing page on your website. An email campaign can probably give you pretty quick results, but remember that some people save emails to be opened at a later date, so even that campaign you probably want to leave for at least a week before you start analyzing your data and applying it to future email marketing campaigns.
Use Your Results to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve given your A/B campaign enough time to gather statistically significant data and you’ve analyzed all that data to determine what your target audience really wants, it’s time to apply all that hard-earned knowledge to your content marketing strategy going forward so you can be sure to get the highest possible return on investment for the time and effort you put into your content marketing efforts going forward.
Rinse and Repeat
Ideally, we should always be improving, and that’s as true of our content marketing strategy as it is of every other aspect of our lives. That means A/B testing in marketing is not a one-and-done strategy. Once you’ve identified a winning strategy from one A/B testing campaign, it’s time to test that winner against another variant to see if it still comes out on top.
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