Digital Marketing

What are landing page AB tests and how to set one up?

Creating a landing page is a very common strategy used by internet marketers. The landing page can be used to capture leads, drive traffic, generate newsletter signups, etc. Before these pages go live, marketers do a lot of work tweaking them content-wise and design-wise to ensure they get the most out of them. In other cases, a marketer would want to see some changes to an existing landing page. However, the marketer is not sure whether such changes will actually be beneficial or harmful. This is where a landing page AB test comes in. This test is used to identify which version of the page gets the best results based on a given criteria. For the test, a version A and a version B of the page will be used. Each version will receive the same amount of exposure and traffic. The test ends after the results have been measured and a conclusion reached.

A landing page has several components. The most common of these components are the ringtone, a subscription form, and a download button. Any of these components can be subject to a landing page AB test. For example, suppose you have a page that features a download button. You suspect your landing page conversion rate is so low because you think the download button isn’t optimized enough. It may be that it is located in the wrong position on the page. Or it is designed with colors or fonts that do not attract your visitor. However, you can’t be sure if these are really the reasons why your page is malfunctioning. That is why you need to perform an AB test to find out if the changes you make to the download button will improve the conversion rate of the page.

The same can be said for the other landing page components. In fact, you can split test multiple page components at the same time. However, this can get very complicated as you will be forced to work with a lot of data. That being said, it is recommended that you test one component at a time. Never underestimate how much of an effect simple changes can have on a landing page. A simple change to the font used in a download button can mean a huge improvement in your conversion rate. A simple change in the color of the text can also get the same positive results. The lesson here is that these small changes can mean big improvements to your marketing program.

To set up an AB test, you first need to decide which landing page component to test. Is it the signup form, the download button, the overall design, or the call-to-action button? Once you’ve decided that, you should create two or three versions of the page that contain the changes you want to see on them. You then generate the same traffic and exposure for them and measure their performance. You can use the Google Website Optimizer tool for free. All you need to do is create a Google account and go through the simple AB testing setup, install some code on your site, and send traffic to the pages you want to test.