What is A/B Testing?
As a web marketer, A/B testing is one of the most powerful tools you can use to increase your site revenue and understand how your marketing messages impact visitor behavior.
In a nutshell, here's how it works:
How it works (the longer version):
A/B testing involves testing several different versions of a web page with live traffic and then measuring the effect each version has on your conversion rates. Imagine a company, Acme Widgets, that operates a web store selling widgets. Visitors to their site are presented with a "Buy" button on each widget details page, which leads to a purchase funnel ending with a confirmation page:
Acme's head of marketing decides that she'd like to test several different colors for the "Buy" button. She uses Optimizely to display a different button randomly to each incoming user:
Optimizely measures the number of visitors who saw each version of the button and then clicked it. It also measures the number of visitors who completed the purchase funnel and landed on the "Thank You" confirmation page. In this case, Acme's head of marketing determined that using the red "Buy" button would likely result in the largest uplift in conversion rate, so Acme then redesigns their product detail pages accordingly.
