If you own an online shop, you will certainly hear a lot about conversion and A/B testing. Have you ever wondered what they are and why they are so important? If you don’t know it yet, it’s high time to make up for this lack of knowledge. Because here ignorance can cost you a lot.
Let’s start with ‘conversion’ and what it means in practice
Conversion is the performance of the desired action by the recipient. Here is the official definition (yeah, we don’t like it too because it explains barely anything). In practice, depending on the nature of the website and the purpose, the conversion can be defined in many different ways. It is because different website owners have different expectations as to the actions of users visiting their site. So as a conversion we can consider e.g. making a purchase or even just adding a product to the shopping cart, registering an account on the portal, signing up to a newsletter, downloading an e-book or watching an advertising video. It all depends on what the purpose of the particular site (or part of the site) is. These are the goals we set for ourselves, and they can be different for everyone.
EXAMPLE: Let’s say you have an online shop. You just added a new product, and you want people to click on a call to action (CTA – that loud button saying ‘buy here’) that encourage them to buy a new product meaning to add it to their shopping cart. So here is your conversion for this particular part of your website – clicking this specific call to action that adds the new product to a shopping cart.
What why do we need to know what a conversion is?
Because if we want to know the effectiveness of our website, we need to know a conversion rate (!) called CR. The indicator shows the percentage of users visiting a given service that has performed the desired action. We calculate it based on a formula:
The number of conversions (i.e. the number of desired actions performed by the recipient) is divided by the number of users’ visits to the website, and then multiplied by 100%.
EXAMPLE: 5 people clicked your CTA from the previous example, and 100 people in general visited this particular website – visited meaning saw the CTA and clicked or not, the most important things is that they were there, they had your CTA in front of their eyes.
100 people in general.
5 people clicked the CTA.
5 divided by 100 gives us 0,005.
Then, 0,05 multiplied by 100% gives us 5%.
So this is our conversion rate. In fact, it would an excellent result. Many e-commerce researchers agree that 3% conversions in an online store is a good result. So here we are to help you to reach your goal. Let technology work for us. We need to start A/B testing NOW.
A/B testing and conversion rate are tools that work for your success (if you use them smartly!)
A/B testing (sometimes also called split testing or multivariate testing – depends on the variant you use) helps you to compare elements on a page (or any type of data) against each other. You need to determine which element performs better in terms of page views, time on page and… conversions. You can compare different headlines or different colored call-to-action button or anything you can define and change. In fact, you just measure which option gives you more conversions. In other words, if more people visiting your online shop liked the red button or the yellow button (as an example).
A/B tests a method used to determine whether a given change made to a page can positively affect the conversion rate. This method is implemented by creating a page with changes (page B), the results of which are compared with those of the original page (page A). The page that has better results in terms of conversion wins. A/B testing is very simple but also very effective. It operates with a single variable. However, this variable does not have to have only two versions. For example, you can test up to 10 versions of the action calls by dividing the traffic into different versions of the same page, each with a different action call.
EXAMPLE: You want to test if a red call-to-action button that says BUY HERE is better than a yellow one.
You start A/B testing on your website. The algorithm sends 50% of people visiting your website to the site with the red CTA, and 50% to the site with the yellow CTA. Later you can analyse which CTA brought you more conversions, meaning was more was more convincing.
It doesn’t matter what type of WordPress site you have; it may be an e-commerce store, affiliate marketing site or your personal blog. If you want to maintain organic traffic and boost your online presence and website quality, it’s crucial that you never stop A/B testing!
There are many tools to do the proper AB testing, and we are here to help you!
Google Optimize Integration For WordPress is a service that helps you to get more organic traffic and improve website quality. With this service you can do A/B Testing (but also many more). We will provide you with training on how to use it best! We provide you also with a detailed analysis and necessary solutions. You don’t need any special knowledge, and waisting your time on reading manuals and reports. We will do it for you. Let technology work for your business, and let our solutions help you reaching your business goals.