A/B testing is one of the most important tools to optimize conversions on your ecommerce website.
Wait, what is A/B testing?
A/B testing compares one variation (in this case a webpage design/layout) to other variations (webpage designs) of the same thing (webpage, purchase button, logo, etc.) in order to discover which one converts the most users (meaning which one results in the most SALES).
In this example I will show you how to do A/B testing for the color of the “buy now” button of the products on your website. We’ll see if changing it from Purple to Red will result in more people clicking the “Buy Now” button.
Currently my website looks like this:
I want change it to this and see if there is an impact:
Many companies offer A/B testing software. I use Google A/B testing, Google Analytics, Unbounce, and Crazyegg. It depends on what you want to A/B test.
For this A/B test we need to use Crazyegg since we will need to track all the products, and see user’s behaviour.
The first thing you have to do is go to Crazyegg and open an account (they offer a 30-day free trial and are a great investment for your website).
Now you have to click Add New Snapshot – a Snapshot is a “photo” of one of your pages that will be used.
Because we want to track the entire website and not only one product we need to do a trick here:
This the snapshot of my product:
http://www.librerialeo.com.mx/guyton-tratado-de-fisiologia-medica-p-288.html
However, I also want to track clicks on all products, I want to track the clicks on aggregate. I know that on my website all the products pages have a –p- on the URL, so what I want to do is use a Wildcard. A Wildcard is basically a way to tell the system to track URL patterns. I click “Use a wildcard”. In the “enter a wildcard pattern” field I add
http://www.librerialeo.com.mx/*-p-*
This tells it to track webpages that have the following URL format http://www.librerialeo.com.mx/(something)-p-(something), so I will be tracking:
http://www.librerialeo.com.mx/guyton-tratado-de-fisiologia-medica-p-288.html
http://www.librerialeo.com.mx/diagnostico-clinico-tratamiento-de-cleaveland-clinic-p-10056.html
www.librerialeo.com.mx/harrison-principios-de-medicina-interna-p-226.html?string
but not:
www.librerialeo.com.mx/
http://www.librerialeo.com.mx/paginas-de-interes-i-13.html
This is how it should look:
Save the URL, get the code and start tracking.
Check if the tracking code is installed correctly.
Now that it’s setup we simply wait a few hours and start tracking.
After the tracking is done change the code on your website for the new test page.
Now repeat the above steps (remember to wait until the first tracking period is done before you create a new Snapshot).
After the Snapshots are done go to “View results”
You will see many options in the top right banner – I encourage you to explore them – they will give you a better understanding of how your visitors behave on your product page – but for this A/B testing you need to go to “list”
Now you can see the click-rate and number of clicks on that page. In this case when the button was purple we had 163 clicks and 15.7% click-rate:
And when the button was red we had only 116 clicks and 9% click-rate
So based on this, it doesn’t make sense for us to change the color of the “buy now” button.
A/B testing is really important if you have an Ecommerce website and Crazyegg gives you a really good set of tools to understand the behaviour of your users. If you need any help or you want me to clarify something please leave your messages in the box below.
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