Download Free: Mobile App A/B Testing Guide

Choosing the right A/B testing tools for mobile apps can be overwhelming for product managers, app developers, and app marketers alike. This is largely because zeroing in on the ideal tool or platform for your unique testing requirements depends on a plethora of parameters, some of which tend to get ignored if you make hasty or ill-informed decisions.

In this blog, we have compiled a list of the top 10 Mobile App A/B Testing tools and how to choose a tool to help you save time and avoid any unnecessary hassle. 

Top 10 A/B testing tools for mobile apps

Here’s a list of popularly known tools for mobile A/B testing tools for app experimentation along with their pros, cons, and pricing.

1. VWO Mobile App Testing

VWO Mobile App Testing is a robust solution for mobile app optimization. From experimenting with multiple variations of in-app user experiences (both user interface and server-side experimentation) to testing key features pre and post-launch, you can do it all with ease. 

Whether you wish to test basic UI changes such as CTA or banner copy, color, and placement, or make drastic optimizations to your search engine algorithms, game experiences, and beyond, you’re well equipped to steadily grow your app conversion rates, engagement, usage, and retention.

You can also combine the mobile app testing tool with VWO Insights which offers heat mapping, session recording, and form analytics capabilities so you can gather actionable insights on your app’s user experience and convert them into optimization opportunities.

Pros:

• Advanced options for segmentation and targeting that allow you to segment your users based on their behavioral attributes and target them exclusively.
• Integrates with all major analytics platforms so you can capture and analyze the relevant data required to make informed experimentation decisions. 
• VWO’s SDK for mobile app A/B testing is open-source and lightweight (approx 200KB for Android and 285KB for iOS) and only uses about 100KB or 300KB of RAM for the iOS and Android apps. 
• VWO offers 24*5 (& exceptional response time) with optimization experts assisting you throughout your journey to ensure you yield the desired results from your campaigns. With a CSAT of 98% (as compared to the industry average of 94%), VWO’s support team takes complete ownership of resolving all pitfalls you may come across, thus ensuring you make the most of your mobile app optimization program

Cons:

• Don’t have a forever free plan like other product offerings.

Pricing:

Offers enterprise plan that costs $1,595 per month and is billed annually. This plan includes the ability to track up to 50,000 users each month. Check out more about pricing and plans.

2. Optimizely

Optimizely offers a cross-platform solution for feature flagging and experimentation that allows you to run UI-based as well as server-side experiments and mitigate risk while launching features. You get access to full-stack and multi-channel experimentation capabilities, phased feature rollouts, the option to make instant app updates, and more with Optimizely’s mobile optimization offering. 

Pros:

• Easy SDK integration that reduces the time to go live with experiments.
• An option to integrate with data warehouses such as Snowflake, which can improve data analysis.
• Ability to target features based on specific locations, demographics, or any custom attributes.

Cons:

• Running software can be costly for small businesses.
• Using Optimizely effectively requires technical expertise, which can be a barrier for non-developer teams. 

Pricing:

They offer a free rollout plan valid for 7 days that allows you to evaluate their basic capabilities.

3. AB Tasty

AB Tasty offers UX analytics, experimentation, personalization, and feature flag management capabilities that allow you to optimize end-to-end experiences on your mobile app. Using these, you can create user segments, offer unique experiences for various segments of your user base, and experiment with features before rolling them out. 

Pros:

• User-friendly dashboard with a variety of features like a dedicated code editor. 
• Simple one-tag implementation to do the initial setup.
• Availability of a variety of targeting options, making it simple to reach diverse customers and segments.

Cons:

• The pricing is not transparent.
• There are superior options available in the market for recording sessions and creating heatmaps. 
• Lack of in-depth integration with third-party tools like ContentSquare for intelligence and analysis.

Pricing:

You can avail of a custom quote from their website based on your unique users/month and other requirements.

4. Adobe Target

Target is a testing and personalization platform from the house of Adobe. Target integrates seamlessly with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager. It can be used for optimizing your app experiences based on your user behavior to improve engagement. 

Pros:

• Experiments can be easily set up and deployed. 
• In-built custom segmentation and audience targeting.

Cons:

• Target does not offer feature management capabilities, so you might opt for a different tool. 
• Lacks post-segmentation capability.

Pricing:

Adobe Target follows a usage-based pricing model that is determined by three key factors: product option, number of monthly visitors, and platform (Web/Server/Mobile).

5. Firebase A/B Testing

From the house of Google Optimize, Firebase A/B Testing provides both experimentation and feature management capabilities. Since it’s offered by Google, it integrates seamlessly with all other tools from Google, such as Google Analytics, so sourcing data and drilling insights for your campaigns will not be an issue. 

Note: Google has decided to sunset Google Optimize and Google Optimize 360 in September 2023. If you are a user, you can move to VWO with just one click.

Pros:

• The app owner can easily roll back any features if they experience issues during testing by monitoring the app’s stability.
• Setting up and deploying experiments is easy. 
• Minimal impact on website speed (497 ms), which is significantly less than other available tools.

Cons:

• There is a limit of 300 total drafts, running, and completed experiments for A/B Testing.
• A/B Testing is restricted to 24 experiments at once, but ending a running test can make room for a new one.
• Firebase experiments can have a maximum of 8 variants, including the baseline.
• Limited options for targeting an audience for an experiment. 
• Firebase lacks the facility to schedule testing campaigns.
• It doesn’t have the option of creating mutually exclusive groups for testing.

Pricing:

The spark plan of Firebase A/B testing is available for free.

6. Leanplum

Leanplum, a subsidiary of Clevertap, specializes in web and mobile app A/B testing coupled with multi-channel lifecycle marketing, enabling seamless personalized mobile experiences from start to finish. Its toolkit encompasses mobile app A/B testing facilitated by an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, comprehensive post-experimentation reporting featuring funnel and cohort analysis, as well as retention and revenue monitoring. The platform allows the creation of personalized user experiences within the app.

Pros:

• Excellent tool for basic operations like creating visually appealing emails, analyzing basic metrics, and audience filters
• Maneuvering tools is difficult without a dev support team.
• Ease to create and deploy custom messages as per customer behavior.

Cons:

• Missing features such as static audience lists, transparent email performance reports, and conversion attribution.
• The cloud version is difficult to operate with a limited interface functionality. 

Pricing:

Leanplum is available for demo on request and offers custom pricing.

7. Amplitude

Amplitude is a product analytics platform with various offerings that include data analysis, data management and integration, data unification using CDP, feature management, and experimentation. It allows you to run simple UI/UX-based app experiments as well as feature experiments on search algorithms and product recommendations. The product depends on sequential testing and T-tests for statistical outcomes of experiments like the A/B test.

Pros:

• User behavior analysis and app A/B testing analysis from a single platform, which overcomes data silos and gaps.
• Elegant data visualization to comprehend customer behavior data from various touchpoints

Cons:

• Difficult to migrate data in and out of the platform.
• Overwhelming and confusing experience because of too many features packed into a single platform.
• Unavoidable tech dependencies to slice and dice data and create customized dashboards.

Pricing:

The pricing is not public, and the experimentation feature is offered at custom prices and in tandem with Amplitudes’s growth and enterprise plans.

8. Taplytics

Taplytics is an A/B testing platform that offers feature management, feature rollout, and client-side and server-side testing. You can deploy A/B tests and personalized experiences on iOS, Android, and mobile web with a code-variable library and visual editor. The platform employs Z-Score and Two-Tailed T-Test to assess experiment performance.

Pros:

• User-centric workflow to deploy code-free and code-based experiments. 
• Very specific control over who you’re reaching, even down to individual email addresses.

Cons:

• Limited third-party integration option, needing workarounds to get things done.
• Can’t break down reports by individual users; only session-level data is available for analysis.

Pricing:

The pro plan starts at $500/month. While the enterprise plan and custom plan depend on the client’s needs. 

9. Apptimize

Apptimize serves as a versatile cross-channel A/B testing solution, facilitating experimentation across various platforms including apps, mobile web, web, and OTT. Its main features include creating omnichannel personalized users, and management of feature releases. You can do it all through a single dashboard for comprehensive testing and management.

Pros:

• User-friendly dashboard that allows you to manage multiple experiments on different channels with ease.
• Assists in anticipating potential feature failures before their release.

Cons:

• Apptimize might not be the best choice in terms of pricing, as it could exceed the budget for certain businesses.
• Developers require time to understand how the platform operates to deploy tests effectively.

Pricing:

Apptimize provides free feature flagging. For more advanced features like cross-platform A/B experiments, they offer custom pricing and plans.

10. LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly focuses on helping you optimize your mobile app with ease. It provides tools for managing feature flags and enhancing mobile app performance on a larger scale. You’ll have the power to control every aspect of your app’s features, from development and testing to deployment and performance evaluation. This control empowers you to reduce potential risks and confidently launch your features.

Pros:

• Ease in the implementation and instant toggling on and off of feature flags.
• Ability to directly resolve bugs and issues without needing to resubmit the app or wait for approvals from the app store.

Cons:

• User creation and management system exhibits disorderliness, as it inadvertently exposes ongoing tests to every newly registered user.
• Overwhelming experience due to the many options available for configuring a target.

Pricing:

You can get started with a free trial or avail yourself of the starter plan at $8.33/month (limited to one member) to try out its basic functionalities. However, this pack does not include experimentation features, for which you will have to upgrade to a higher plan. 

Know how high-performance teams launch features

We have a 60-minute recorded webinar about feature rollout that can help your product launch. In this webinar, Sonil Luthra and Rohan Shorey from VWO talk about how to introduce new features effectively. They use some real-life examples and even discuss how a well-known brand did it. They’ll also answer any questions you have about getting your new feature accepted and how well it performs. This webinar will give you new ideas and understanding to make your product even better.

Watch: Feature rollout – How high-performance teams launch features

How to choose the right mobile app A/B testing tool?

The ideal Mobile App A/B Testing platform is robust enough to offer extensive testing functionality that allows you to optimize your end-to-end in-app experiences as well as feature management capabilities so you can manage your entire feature lifecycle. Ultimately, the aim is to figure out the right variation of in-app experiences and features in order to optimize your app for improved engagement and conversions. 

To select the tool best suited for your CRO roadmap, consider the following parameters.

1. Use case at hand

Mobile App A/B Testing has a myriad of use cases similar to the A/B testing of the mobile web version. For you to be able to select the right tool for your business, you need to first have a clear understanding of the use cases you want to tackle (at least the ones you wish to begin with). Once you are clear about that, you are automatically a step closer to narrowing down on the tool that offers maximum capabilities that cater to your requirements.  

Some of the most common use cases of mobile app A/B testing include:

a. eCommerce

i. Eliminating friction in key user flows

For today’s on-the-go buyer who demands seamless shopping experiences, friction in user interactions and flows, especially one as critical as checkout, can lead to frustration and loss of interest, which ultimately increases your abandonment rate. In fact, did you know that mobile has the highest cart abandonment rate (beating tablets and desktops) of 85.65%? A/B testing your eCommerce app’s user flows can help you radically reduce drop-offs and abandonment rate, by paving the way for a delightful user experience.

Mobile app A/B testing tools allow you to create two or more variants of your user flows so you can pit them against each other and deploy the one that leads to the maximum improvement in your key user engagement metrics. Furthermore, your tool must also enable you to segment your users based on their purchase and browsing behavior, and other demographic attributes so you can target them with the most relevant variation and figure out what works for which group.

ii. Optimizing for the efficacy of search and product recommendation algorithms

Should your product recommendation algorithm be based on shoppers’ purchase history, trending items, or the most popular products from a particular category? How should your search algorithm categorize products, decide their relevance to a specific search query, and on what criteria should they be ranked on the search results page?

With mobile app A/B testing, you shouldn’t have to rely on guesswork or best practices to find the answers to the above questions. While testing UI-based changes is one use case that a robust tool caters to, it also allows you to experiment with your critical algorithms, including product recommendation and search, so you can strategically improve their efficacy. By testing multiple versions of your algorithms, you can figure out which one proves to be the most effective for your store, whether it is in driving upsell/cross-sell or fetching the most relevant search results.

b. Gaming

i. Experimenting with in-app features before deploying universally

Universally deploying a new feature in your game can be quite tricky. You could either hit the jackpot and instantly watch your app usage and engagement levels jump up, or, on a more realistic note, it may or may not drive the results you thought it would. Therefore, mobile app A/B testing tools allow you to reduce the risk associated with launching in-game changes and updates by experimenting with them and rolling them out in stages to one or more of your user segments. If it performs well, you can go ahead and deploy it for all users; if not, you can always collect feedback, incorporate it, improve it, and relaunch the enhanced app version with confidence.

Mobile app A/B testing tools also offer extensive feature lifecycle management capabilities wherein you can roll out features in stages, test them out on a particular user segment, and even use feature flags to manage them at runtime and control and/or modify who gets access to it.

ii. Streamlining in-app pricing strategy

To maximize engagement on your gaming app as well as revenue, you might have to experiment with multiple pricing strategies, for different user segments as the same model might not work for both disengaged and loyal gamers. Therefore, choose a mobile app A/B testing tool that allows you to test your dynamic pricing algorithm to figure out which one drives the best results for which segment.

iii. Offer personalized gaming experiences

In today’s day and age, mobile app gaming experiences demand hyper-personalization, and rightfully so. To create an enticing gaming environment that keeps gamers hooked, you cannot possibly rely on a single strategy. Using a mobile app A/B testing tool, you can test all dynamic elements of your gaming app and deliver personalized experiences based on each gamer’s level in the game, engagement score, and other attributes. This way, you can constantly discover and deliver what your users expect from you to keep them engaged. 

The bottom line is that whichever use case you want to achieve with mobile app A/B testing, you want to be sure of it beforehand so you can make a strategic decision of choosing the right one based on your requirements. 

2. Integrations and plugins offered by the tool

You want to make sure that whichever tool you opt for is the right addition to your tech stack, meaning that it integrates seamlessly with your other analytics, marketing, and sales platforms, so you don’t have a hard time accessing the required data and feeding it into your app optimization pipeline. For example, the most important one would be your analytics platform, so you can use it to generate insights about your website traffic and target audience, which will then form the basis for crafting hypotheses.

For this, create a list of tools you currently use and look for the ones supported by the experimentation platform you are evaluating. If you own an eCommerce business, you might also want to ensure that whichever eCommerce platform your store is built on (such as Shopify or WooCommerce) is also supported.  

VWO, for instance, integrates with all major web analytics tools, eCommerce platforms, CSM platforms, sales, and ABM platforms.

3. Size, RAM usage, and performance of the SDK

The SDK supported by the platform deserves your attention as well as it can impact your app’s performance. Here are the parameters that you must evaluate it for: 

• The SDK must be lightweight, so it does not have any significant impact on the size of your app. 
• Should not use a lot of RAM as mobile devices anyway have scarce RAM availability. 
• Must perform well and be easily available at all times. VWO’s SDK for mobile app A/B testing is available even without an active internet connection and is tested extensively to get rid of all bugs that might negatively impact your app’s performance.

4. Reporting capabilities

It’s important to pay heed to understanding the computation of A/B test results and generation of reports as it determines the impact of your experimentation. Statistics is the backbone of A/B testing, which is based on the calculation of probabilities. However, there are multiple approaches to interpreting probabilities in A/B testing – the most common ones being Frequentist and Bayesian models.

Make sure you find out whether the tool you have shortlisted uses the Frequentist or Bayesian statistical model. Traditionally, most tools used the Frequentist model wherein test results are based solely on the data from the current mobile app experiments and do not take into account any previous data. The Frequentist model is based on running a particular test for a specific period of time and until statistical significance is reached so enough data can be collected to rightfully calculate the probability of one variation beating the other. However, it does not quantify the difference between the two variations keeping in account the uncertainty involved with the amount of data you obtained in a test. 

The Bayesian statistical model, on the other hand, provides a natural way of learning by allowing you to feed in your beliefs from similar previous experiments into the model as prior, combine it with data from the current one, and then compute the test results. The probability of your hypothesis being correct is computed based on evolving data and informed by what’s happened up to that point. 

VWO’s Bayesian-powered statistics engine, SmartStats, helps you make smarter conversion rate optimization decisions by not only giving you the probability of one variation beating the other but also the potential loss associated with its deployment. With SmartStats, you can move away from relying solely on reaching statistical significance or running tests for a set period of time and can conclude tests faster and expect more accurate results. SmartStats helps you make intelligent business decisions, faster and gain a competitive edge over your competitors. 

Imagine a scenario where you are not sure whether providing an add-on offer with your service can lead to more sales. You planned to do an A/B test to test this hypothesis by allocating one-half of traffic to service with add-on (Variation A) and the other half without add-on (Variation B). 

A traditional Frequentist test would only provide a yes/no answer if variation A is different from variation B. Also, the test results are valid only after you have obtained a sufficient number of visitors in your test.

However, VWO’s Bayesian powered statistics engine, SmartStats, provides you the odds of one variation beating the other and also the underlying potential loss in sales associated with each variation. Both metrics remain valid throughout the duration of the test. 

With SmartStats, you can move away from binary outputs to more interpretable metrics.

Download Free: Mobile App A/B Testing Guide

5. Your budget

Needless to say, your budget is a huge factor to consider in choosing a tool. Based on the specific use cases you want to tackle and the features you require, you will have to look for a tool that fits the bill as well as fits well into your budget so you can drive significant ROI from your experimentation program. 

Especially if you are just starting out with mobile app optimization, opting for a comparatively expensive tool might not yield you a significant ROI. Instead, start with a tool that offers a free trial, so you can assess all its features comprehensively and decide whether it meets your requirements. VWO, for instance, offers a free trial that your team can utilize to run a few campaigns and figure out if your unique needs are met.

6. Support and assistance offered by the platform

When evaluating a tool, people often overlook the level and quality of support that the platform offers. However, it is a critical factor that plays a major role in determining the testing velocity and scale of your optimization program. If you receive dedicated, expert assistance throughout your journey, you will be able to achieve your goals more efficiently and grow your efforts with time. 

Moreover, if you’re new to mobile app A/B testing, you might need some help in setting up the first few campaigns and generating ideas to do an A/B test So, make sure you opt for a tool that offers the best-in-class support (quick response time, maximum availability, sufficient self-help resources, omni-channel support, CSAT, and so on) so you can not only get up to speed but also drive the intended results effectively.

Even if you are somewhat experienced and well-versed with A/B testing your mobile app experiences, you might need extensive support immediately after signing up for a new tool. To that end, make sure you opt for a tool that offers dedicated support, quick TATs, and effective resolution to help you troubleshoot all your experimentation roadblocks.

Truth be told – you need a tool that’s all-encompassing. There isn’t one factor mentioned above that’s less important and you shouldn’t have to compromise on the quality of testing or your requirements. 

Conclusion

Choosing the right tool that best aligns with your experimentation goals is only the first (although extremely crucial) step towards improving your app’s key metrics. Leveraging the tool successfully means closing the optimization loop by investing time and effort in everything from benchmarking your KPIs to documenting your learnings and feeding them back into your testing roadmap. Sign up for a free trial with VWO to do this with ease. 

Frequently asked questions

Statistics is the cornerstone of A/B testing, and calculating probabilities is the basis of statistics. Therefore, you can never be 100% sure of the accuracy of the results you receive or reduce risk to 0%. Instead, you can only increase the possibility of the test result being true. But as test owners, you should not need to bother about this as your tool should take care of this. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

Even after following all the essential steps, your test result reports might get skewed by errors that unknowingly creep into the process. Popularly known as Type 1 and Type 2 errors, these essentially lead to an incorrect conclusion of tests and/or erroneous declaration of winner and loser. This causes misinterpretation of test result reports, which ultimately misleads your entire optimization program and could cost you conversions and even revenue. 

Let’s take a closer look at what exactly do we mean by Type 1 and Type 2 errors, their consequences, and how you can avoid them.

What are some of the errors that creep into your A/B test results?

What is a type 1 error?

Also known as Alpha (α) errors or false positive, in the case of Type 1 error, your test seems to be succeeding, and your variation seems to cause an impact (better or worse) on the goals defined for the test. However, the uplift or drop in this hypothesis testing is only temporary and is not going to last once you deploy the winning version universally and measure its impact over a significant period. It happens when you conclude your test before reaching statistical significance or the pre-decided criteria and rush into rejecting your null hypothesis and accepting the winning variation.

The null hypothesis states that the said change will have no impact on the given metric/goal. And in the case of Type 1 errors, the null hypothesis is true but rejected because of the untimely conclusion of tests or miscalculation of the criteria for the conclusion.

What is the probability of type 1 error?

The probability of making a Type 1 error is denoted by ‘α’ and correlated to the confidence level, where you decide to conclude your test. This means that if you conclude your test at a 95% confidence level, you accept that there is a 5% probability of getting the wrong result. In the same way, if that confidence level is 99%, the probability of the test result being wrong is 1%. You could call it sheer bad luck, but if you run into an α error even after concluding your test at a 95% confidence level, it means that an event with merely 5% probability has occurred.

Type 1 error example

Let’s assume, you devise a hypothesis that shifting your landing page CTA to above the fold will lead to an increase in the number of sign-ups. The null hypothesis here is that there would be no impact of changing the placement of the CTA on the number of sign-ups received.

Once the test commences, you get tempted to peek into the results and notice a whopping 45% uplift in sign-ups generated by the variation within a week. You are convinced that the contrast is considerably better and end up concluding the test, rejecting the null hypothesis, and deploying the variation universally—only to notice that it no longer has a similar impact but instead has no impact at all. The only explanation is that your test result report has been skewed by the Type 1 error.

The impact of type 1 errors

Type 1 error happens because you didn’t take into account the duration or the sample size for a hypothesis testing. The type 1 error brings in a false positive and you think your test has yielded results even though it hasn’t. The impact of this percolates into your business bottom line and dampens it. Implementing the wrong experience could result in decreased conversions, loss of potential customers, and of courses wasted resources on implementing ineffective changes.

How to avoid type 1 errors

While you cannot completely do away with the possibility of running into a Type 1 error, you can certainly reduce it. For that, make sure you conclude your tests only once they’ve reached a high enough confidence level. A 95% confidence level is considered ideal, and that is what you must aim to achieve. Even after reaching a 95% confidence level, your test results might get altered by the Type 1 error (as discussed above).

Therefore, you also need to ensure that you run your tests for long enough to guarantee that a good sample size has been tested upon, thereby increasing the credibility of your test results. 

You can use VWO’s A/B testing duration calculator to determine the ideal period for which you must run a particular test. Similarly, you can also calculate your A/B testing sample size to ensure you conclude tests only when you have the lowest chance of ending up with adulterated results.

VWO’s Bayesian model-powered statistics engine, SmartStats, helps you reduce the probability of encountering a Type 1 error.

What is a type 2 error?

Also known as Beta (β) errors or false negatives, in the case of Type 2 errors, a particular statistical test seems to be inconclusive or unsuccessful, with the null hypothesis appearing to be true. In reality, the variation impacts the desired goal, but the results fail to show, and the evidence favors the null hypothesis. This is how type 2 errors occur, as you end up (incorrectly) accepting the null hypothesis and rejecting your hypothesis and variation. 

Type 2 errors usually lead to the abandonment and discouragement of statistical tests but, in worst cases, lack of motivation to pursue the CRO roadmap as one tends to disregard the efforts, assuming it to have made no impact. 

What is the probability of type 2 error?

‘β’ denotes the probability of making a Type 2 error. The probability of not running into a Type 2 error is denoted by 1 – β, dependent on the power of the statistical test. The higher the statistical power of your test, the lower the likelihood of encountering Type 2 error (false negative). If you are running a test at 90% statistical power, there is merely a 10% chance that you might end up with a false negative. 

The statistical power of a test is dependent on the statistical significance threshold, sample size, the minimum effect size of interest, and even the number of variations of the test. 

Here’s how they are related: 

Type 2 error example

Let’s assume that you hypothesize that adding security badges on your payment page would help you decrease the percentage of drop-offs at that stage. You create a variation of the payment page with the security badges and run your test, only to peek at the results 10 days after its commencement. Upon noticing no change in the number of conversions or drop-offs, you decide to conclude the test and declare the null hypothesis to be true.

Not convinced by the test results, you decide to rerun the test—only this time you let it run for longer. Consequently, you notice a significant improvement in your conversion goal this time around. What happened the first time was that you had encountered the Type 2 error by concluding the test before the required time. 

The impact of type 2 errors

Similar to Type 1 errors, Type 2 errors can lead to reduced conversions and lost sales opportunities. But the impact of Type 2 errors or false negative goes beyond just lost revenue. It directly affects the efficacy of your conversion program. Having confidence in your hypotheses (provided they are based on user behavior analyses) is crucial to run a test that shows the right impact by reaching statistical significance. By prematurely stopping tests and declaring false negatives, you miss the opportunity to prove your hypothesis and your credibility in running a dedicated CRO program. 

How to avoid type 2 errors

By improving the statistical power of your tests, you can avoid Type 2 errors. You can do this by increasing your sample size and decreasing the number of variants. Interestingly, improving the statistical power to reduce the probability of false negative can also be achieved by decreasing the statistical significance threshold, but, in turn, it increases the probability of Type 1 errors. However, since reducing the probability of Type 1 errors usually takes precedence over avoiding Type 2 errors (as its consequences can be more severe), it is advisable to not interfere with the statistical significance level for the sake of improving power.

Type 1 error vs Type 2 error – Which is worse?

Frankly, both type 1 and type 2 errors can be considered worse depending on a specific context. But while type 2 errors lead to missed opportunities to follow your hypothesis and innovate, Type 1 is worse in terms of its negative impact on user experience and the resources you spent to pull off this test. In type 1 errors, you overlook other variants that could be better and implement the one that shows a positive impact on conversion for the time being. 

Can you guess why type 2 errors are still less dangerous? This is because you continue using the version that has shown at least some level of success in impacting user experience over time. While missed opportunities may occur, the potential negative impact is generally lower compared to the risks associated with implementing changes based on false positive conclusions.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

How to calculate type 1 or type 2 error?

In the case of hypothesis testing, type 1 and type 2 errors can be seen as more like hyper-parameters that influence the testing methodology but they are not calculated individually in a standalone manner.

The significance level (α) is set to control the probability of Type 1 error. This value is determined based on the desired level of confidence and tolerance for false positives. Similarly, the power (β) is set to control the probability of Type 2 error. This value is determined based on the desired level of confidence and tolerance for False Negatives(declaring true effects as no effects). Type 1 error and Type 2 error together are primarily used for sample size calculations.

Therefore, these errors act as facilitators in calculations of statistical significance of test results rather than outputs to be directly calculated.

VWO SmartStats – the smarter, Bayesian way to business decision-making

Ideally, as a test owner, statistics is not something you should focus on since your quest is not to find the truth with your experiments—your motive is to make a better business decision that generates higher revenue for you. So, the important thing is to work with a tool that helps you make a better, smarter choice—without you having to get into the details of statistics. 

As per the Frequentist model of inferential statistics, the conclusion of a test is entirely dependent on reaching statistical significance. If you end a test before it reaches statistical significance, you are likely to end up with a false positive (Type 1 error). 

VWO’s Bayesian model-powered statistics engine, SmartStats, calculates the probability that this variation will beat the control as well as the potential loss that you might incur upon deploying it. VWO shows you the possible loss associated with deploying the variation so you can make an informed choice. 

This potential loss also helps to decide when to conclude a particular test. After the conclusion of the test, the variation is declared the winner only if the potential loss of the variation is below a certain threshold. This threshold is determined by taking into account the conversion rate of the control version, the number of visitors that were a part of the test, and a constant value. 

Not only does VWO SmartStats reduce your testing time by 50%—as you do not rely on reaching a set time and sample size to conclude your test—but, also gives you more control over your experiments. It gives you a clear probability which helps you make decisions based on the type of test you are running. For instance, if you are testing a low impact change such as changing button color, maybe a 90% probability is good enough to call a variation a winner.

Or, if you are testing something at the last step of the funnel, you may want to wait until 99% probability. You’re, then, in a position to increase your testing velocity by concluding low impact tests quicker and prioritizing high impact ones in your roadmap.

A Frequentist-based statistics model will only give you the probability of seeing a difference in variations by assuming that it is an A/A test. This approach, however, assumes that you are doing the test computation only after you have obtained sufficient sample size. VWO SmartStats doesn’t make any assumptions, instead empowers you to make smarter business decisions by reducing the probability of running into Type 1 and Type 2 errors. This is because it estimates the probability of the variation beating the control, by how much, along with the associated potential loss associated, allowing you to continuously monitor these metrics while the test is running.

Rely on VWO’s sophisticated reporting and accurate results

Since aiming for absolute certainty is extremely difficult with statistics, you cannot eliminate the possibility of your test results not being skewed due to an error. However, by choosing a robust tool like VWO, you can lower your chances of making errors or reduce the risk associated with these errors to an acceptable level. To understand more about how exactly VWO can keep you from falling prey to such errors, try out VWO’s free trial or request a demo by one of our optimization experts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

If you expand on GPT-3.5 Turbo, here’s what it denotes: 

Generative: Indicating that the goal of the model is to generate text by predicting one word at a time in a given sentence. 

Pre-trained: Indicating that a huge amount of data has been fed into the system to train it.

Transformer: Indicating the algorithm used by the AI model, which specializes in natural language processing, i.e., how words are used in a language and what they mean. 

Once GPT-3.5 Turbo is fed a prompt, it generates streams of text by predicting the possibility of a sentence existing in this world. Currently, the functionality is in beta and only offered to a select group (including VWO) through an API accessible via the cloud. 

Let’s face it – copywriting is no easy task. GPT-3.5 Turbo’s robust and flexible language model can produce a short copy at scale. If you add to that the ability to test copy versions, you can get the best of both worlds. Also, some of the most commonly run tests revolve around webpage copy. So, integrating Open AI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo API with VWO Testing was the most natural and logical thing for us to do.

Our new feature enables you to use AI-generated copy to create variations for your website copy and deploy them without any help from IT. You can also test the AI-generated copy against the original human-written copy on your website. The next section covers how popular brands uncovered the practical implications of our new feature via a friendly contest between human-written and AI-generated copy. 

VWO’s Human vs. AI competition

In August this year, VWO hosted a friendly competition between copy written by human copywriters and that by our new feature powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo API. We invited participants from all over the world and tested AI-generated text against human-written one for their webpages with sufficient traffic via VWO or any other testing platform they were using. 

Over 450 brands were given access to the AI copy generating feature during the course of this competition. Among the 18 shortlisted participants were Booking.com, Clark Germany GmbH, and Schneiders, to name a few. The AI feature was able to generate copies in various languages such as Spanish, German, Portuguese, etc. The participants were highly satisfied with the accuracy of the output in these languages.

All participants had to set up their tests keeping the original website copy as the control and the AI-generated one(s) as the variation. 

Results of the competition

Among the 18 tests run by the confirmed participants, 1 had an existing (or new) human written copy as the winner, 3 had AI copy as the winner, 3 were declared as a tie, 2 are still awaiting results, and 9 were inconclusive. 

Let’s take a look at some of the tests where the AI-generated copy won:

Schneiders [An eCommerce store for horse wear & equipment]

The team tested their topmost banner copy by creating a variation of the original page using the AI-backed language generator. Here’s a look at the control and variation from the test:

Once statistically significant results were achieved, the A/B test declared the variation to be the winner as it led to a 7.06% uplift in their banner clicks.

Clark Germany GmbH [An insurance agency based out of Frankfurt]

3 variations of the page headline were created using the AI copy and pit against the control. The test was run for 48 days. Following are the control and variations of the test: 

Once the test reached conclusion (statistical significance >  90%), all 3 variations outperformed the control. Variation 2 resulted in the maximum uplift in their CTA clicks (15.77%), while Variation 1 and 3 resulted in an uplift of 9.13% & 7.13%, respectively.

Here’s the test that declared the human copy as the winner:

Booking.com [A global travel company]

The team at Booking.com tested the CTA on their hotel booking pages. 2 human-written copies were pitted against an AI-generated one. Following are the variations they created:

The human copy #1 won the test as it resulted in a 1.7% uplift in the CTA conversion rate.

Here’s a test that resulted in a human-AI tie:

Springworks [A SaaS company based out of India]

The team at Springworks tested their landing page headline by creating a variation using the AI-generated copy and pitting it against the original (control). Their goal was to improve clicks on the ‘Add Trivia’ CTA. The test was run for 8 days. Here’s a look at the control and variation:

Since the difference in the uplift in CTA clicks between the control and variation was less than 5%, and the test results were statistically insignificant, the test was declared to be a tie. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

Let’s deep dive into the nitty-gritty of how VWO Testing and GPT-3.5 Turbo work together.

VWO Testing & GPT-3.5 Turbo

We integrated Open AI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo API with our Visual Editor so that every time you decide to run a test or deploy a change, you can generate copy recommendations that you can choose to create variations out of. This means you get to cut down on time spent brainstorming on variations and alternatives by having a library of AI-generated ideas readily available at your disposal. 

Whether you are looking to optimize headlines, CTA text, product descriptions, or any other text on your site, you can quickly generate alternatives and either directly deploy them or test them against your original copy, both without any developer help. Either way, by automating this aspect of experimentation, you get to make your CRO program more efficient and agile. 

Once you open VWO’s Visual Editor and click on any piece of text, you will find a ‘Suggest Variations’ option in the drop-down menu. Clicking on it will display a bunch of AI-powered copy suggestions (based on the existing copy) that you can choose from.

Sounds too good to be true? Sign up for a free trial by VWO and assess the GPT-3.5 Turbo feature for yourself.

What the future holds for GPT-3.5 Turbo, automated copywriting, and testing

Experts have conflicting views about the scope of GPT-3.5 Turbo and the extent to which humans can leverage it to automate copywriting. While some feel that the model can be trained to mimic and replace human written copy, others argue that it lacks the ability to construct cohesive sentences, use reasoning or logic constructively, or build a narrative – something you can only expect from a human copywriter. 

It is hard to anticipate everything that might happen. We don’t think we can get everything right, certainly not up front. Still, it’s better to play around with this type of technology now while it can still be controlled and learn lessons to be applied as AI gets ever more powerful

Greg Brockman, Co-Founder & CTO, OpenAI

Whether automated copywriting will be a norm in the future is something we are yet to figure out as we explore GPT-3.5 Turbo’s full potential. However, what we know for sure is that this innovation is going to be revolutionary when it comes to copy experimentation. 

With your new AI partner, you get to reduce the time spent on manual work as well as iterations with a copywriter. As you generate AI copy on demand within seconds and make real-time quick fixes on your website, you can create short-form content at scale and thus take a giant leap towards increasing your experimentation velocity and evolving your CRO program. 

The power of GPT-3.5 Turbo in copy-driven optimization is immense, and we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg so far. However, some restraint is advised because we cannot equate it with the intelligence of human copywriters – not yet, at least. The real value, at least for now, lies in being able to effectively test out copy variations while reducing the back and forth with copywriters and developers. The good thing is we can keep leveraging the power of GPT-3.5 Turbo to run better and faster experiments using platforms like VWO.

Building a sustainable CRO roadmap guides your efforts and ensures it systematically contributes towards your business goals at large. Whether you are an agency handling CRO for hundreds of clients or someone who manages CRO for your company, a roadmap will streamline your efforts and maximize throughput by avoiding redundancies and providing a clear step-by-step approach towards optimizing your site. 

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

Similar to a calendar, a CRO roadmap is essentially a detailed schedule that entails which experiment will be launched when, the time and resources it requires, and the expected outcome. A roadmap ensures that each tweak, change, test, and insight adds value to the next step and accordingly strengthens it to deliver improved results. With a dedicated roadmap to consult, you don’t rely on hope to get results from a few poorly planned and ill-executed experiments scattered across months.

Why do you need a CRO roadmap?

You can think of a CRO roadmap as a step-by-step framework that you refer to for prioritization, test planning, and allocation of resources for all your CRO efforts, without which you would be completely shooting in the dark. Here are some of the major reasons you need a CRO roadmap to get started.

To switch from a fragmented to a strategic approach

If you randomly run a survey on your homepage this month and conduct a couple of tests on your product page the next month (and so on), you are not going to be able to make the most of the insights gathered or leverage the full potential of the results. To do so, you need a roadmap that dictates every process so you can feed every insight and learning into your pipeline and use it judiciously to drive more substantial results from your program as opposed to some scattered wins or losses.

Let’s say you want to improve your online store’s checkout rate. Needless to say, there are tonnes of tests you can run to optimize for the same. For instance, you could optimize the number of steps in the checkout flow, add social proof and trust badges, avoid the addition of surprise costs at the last step, and so on. Now, without a roadmap, you wouldn’t know which one to prioritize and you might just end up spending too much time running each one of them without getting the expected outcome. On the other hand, if you follow a roadmap, prioritize tests, plan and scope them out over a calendar month/quarter, you can be assured of more promising results.

To get a better hold of resource planning

Again, if you have a systemic approach to optimization, you can always plan your resources in advance, delegate projects, and overall function smoothly with little or no friction as opposed to facing a mini resource crisis every time you decide you want to run an ad-hoc test. 

Moreover, you can always learn from experience and incorporate your learnings of how you can allocate resources better to drive more significant results, efficiently. This is not possible if you follow a haphazard outlook towards optimization and don’t depend on any set framework to guide decisions. 

To improve the speed and efficiency of your CRO program

Needless to say, optimizing your digital properties methodically will only improve the efficiency of your efforts as you would be incorporating previous learnings and doubling down on what works well. Having an overarching roadmap also ensures your processes and tasks are aligned with the overall business goals, so there is minimum iteration, faster delivery, and more promising results.

For instance, if you follow a roadmap, you will know which tests you have to run in the coming month and have the liberty to start laying the groundwork (analyzing data, getting variations created, etc.) and plan your resources accordingly. On the other hand, if you are running sporadic tests, you will end up wasting time in deciding what to test next, ensuring it doesn’t overlap with another test, and planning your resources for it.

How to develop a successful CRO roadmap

Revisit your business goals

Take a step back to revisit your most pressing and current business goals so you can understand how CRO can help you achieve them. These goals will anchor your CRO program and ensure your efforts are not aimless or applied in the wrong direction. 
For example, an eCommerce company could have a business goal to increase the average order value, while for a media company, the goal could be to uplift the content consumption on their site. These will then help you deduce what your optimization goals (and their corresponding metrics) need to be.

Deduce corresponding website goals, KPIs, and target metrics from your business goals

Use your business goals to drill down upon what are some of the more tactical website goals you want your CRO program to achieve, what are the performance indicators you need to watch out for, and what would be the target metrics you need to measure corresponding to them. For instance, if increasing the average order value is your business goal, you can break it down further into:

• Increasing upsell & cross-sell 
• Increasing visits to product pages
• Increasing checkout and ‘Add to cart’ rate

Now, these could be your optimization goals, each of which you can tackle using specific strategies and tests. The metrics to be measured could be revenue per customer, conversion rates, and so on. 

Understand where you currently stand and establish a baseline for your key metrics

Before commencing, you will need to perform a CRO audit of your site to establish a starting point for your optimization program against which your progress can be assessed. Therefore, for all your key metrics, be sure to analyze your historical data so you can condense it into a baseline basis the trends and patterns it shows. Make sure the date range you select for this is not less than 30 days, as you would need a substantial amount of data to be able to gauge your business’ past performance against these metrics.

Formulate data-backed hypotheses taking insights from visitor behavior data

Use the data you have been gathering through various tools like heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, Google Analytics, and other user research tools to glean insights that you can turn into optimization opportunities. For instance, if you noticed high drop-offs at category pages, you could consider revamping them to highlight the CTA, reduce clutter, and make product details more appealing and apparent to customers. 

Next, craft your hypotheses based on these insights that can move your key metrics and solve for these visitor pain points. Here’s how you can formulate a solid hypothesis:

Prioritize these hypotheses

Optimizing the optimization process is often just as important as the tests themselves. Prioritizing where you invest energy will give you better returns by emphasizing pages that are more important to the business

Chris Goward – Founder, WiderFunnel

Now that you have a bunch of different test hypotheses at your disposal, prioritize them so you can populate your pipeline in a way that you tackle issues that are more likely to yield maximum results first. There are several different prioritization frameworks you can follow for the same: 

P.I.E. Framework [By Chris Goward]

As per this model, each hypothesis is given a score of 1-10 on three factors – Potential, Importance, and Ease. This translates to the amount of potential a particular hypothesis has in improving the performance of a page, how important is it to optimize a particular page, and how easily the task can be accomplished. Once assigned scores for each of these factors, you just add them up for every hypothesis and prioritize them basis their total scores. 

T.I.R. Model [By Bryan Eisenberg]

As per this framework, a score of 1-5 is assigned based on Time, Impact, and Resources. This means that a test that requires minimal time, has the most impact, and requires the least amount of readily available resources would be given a 5 under every factor. Once done, individual scores of each factor are multiplied, and the highest priority is given to one with the largest score.

I.C.E. Framework [By Sean Ellis]

As per this model, a score of 1-5 (with 5 being the highest) is assigned to each hypothesis based on the likely Impact it would have, the level of Confidence you have in the hypothesis, and what is the level of Ease with which it can be implemented. Once all 3 scores are added, the hypothesis with the highest score is given the highest priority, and so on.  

While these were a couple of the most popular frameworks, there are others you can consult to prioritize your tests so they can be picked in the descending order and fed into your pipeline. But, that’s not all. You should also categorize your hypotheses basis the final goals (the ones discussed above) they accomplish.

Collate all the information collected so far

Now that you have drilled down your business goals to tactical conversion goals you plan to achieve with CRO, and also used visitor behavior insights to craft hypotheses that can help you achieve them, you can start breaking each test down into its specific details. 

This would include your test name, description, hypothesis, observation, target page, and goal it is expected to accomplish. Share this spreadsheet with all stakeholders so that it can be enriched and evolved as your progress in your program.

Create your testing pipeline

Create a proper schedule to plan out your experiments considering their priority order, resource bandwidth, and time required for implementation. Assign owners to each test and make sure you keep track of the progress and the results obtained so you can use your learnings constructively to enrich your pipeline. Here’s an example template you can refer to for creating a weekly A/B testing plan:

Creating one such calendar would especially be useful for agencies so you can always use a standardized template for all your clients and deliver promised results systematically. 

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

Challenges to roadmapping

Miscalculation of time and resources required

Creating a CRO and testing roadmap requires you to carefully plan your schedules and resources well in advance, which can sometimes be a challenge for teams that are new to experimentation. You might not be able to accurately estimate your requirements before actually getting into the process. Very often, running experiments can take extra time, and it’s not in your control to wrap them up sooner. For instance, if a test takes longer (than you had anticipated) to reach statistical significance, you couldn’t have accounted for it, and now you have to hold off the next one to ensure they do not overlap. 

The best way out of this is to always keep a buffer or stick to a conservative estimate, both for time and resources, and any other requirement you might have, to accommodate for unexpected changes that occur during experiments. 

Inaccuracy, inconsistency, or unavailability of data to inform your CRO roadmap

If you haven’t been relying heavily on data for all decision-making, you might struggle at first with creating a data-backed roadmap. This is largely because you will most likely discover inconsistencies or inaccuracies that don’t add up, you would have data stored in silos, or you wouldn’t have comprehensive data for the entire time range and critical metrics you want to look at. 

To overcome this, use only data you know for sure is accurate and enough to inform your hypotheses and eliminate what you feel is only corrupting your roadmap. You can also prioritize your hypotheses in such a manner that those already backed by sufficient data are ones you test first and collect more data for those that need to be strengthened. 

Not evolving your strategy with changing times and scenarios

After you have spent a whole lot of time and effort building your roadmap from scratch, it is quite natural to want to just stick to it. However, committing to one strategy with all your heart and soul and not being open to evolving it with the changing dynamics of your business or the industry will do you more harm than good. 

To stay ahead of the curve, you need to keep evolving your roadmap so you can accommodate for these changes. For example, if the festive season is coming up and it’s time for your annual sale, you would want to run a test or two catered specifically to the sale, and hence it’s important you have provision to take that decision quickly and incorporate it into your plan. 

Tools you need to build and maintain a CRO roadmap

VWO Plan

VWO Plan allows teams to collaborate and create experimentation pipelines seamlessly and efficiently. It’s an all-in-one platform that empowers you to record observations, generate hypotheses, save ideas, and create and manage your experimentation program via a centralized dashboard. You can forget about data/idea silos and maintaining multiple documents, sheets, presentations, whiteboards, or dashboards, and rely on a single platform to ideate, run experiments, and measure their impact. 

Watch this video for a quick overview of VWO Plan

Jira

From the house of Atlassian, Jira is an agile project management and tracking software you can use to manage your CRO pipeline. You can easily plan and track your workflows over a kanban board to the most minute detail and collaborate with various teams to ensure you conduct your experiments efficiently and drive faster results.

Trello

Trello is another project management software that allows you to track and manage your CRO roadmap and work collaboratively and efficiently. Apart from organizing, prioritizing, and managing your pipeline, Trello enables you to boost productivity by automating redundant and manual tasks such as due date and calendar commands.

Asana

Asana is an easy-to-use project management software that provides a timeline view of your CRO pipeline and allows you to track its progress. It offers integration with all major tools such as Salesforce, Tableau, and Adobe Cloud and customizes your workflows as per your specific requirements. 

Conclusion

Approaching CRO with a strategic roadmap ensures that every effort is tied to your overall business goal. Without one, you are most likely to rely on disintegrated efforts, which may or may not show significant results. Therefore, roadmapping is the way to go to achieve success with CRO and drive noteworthy business growth. It’s time to put your knowledge to test and embark on a strategic CRO journey by creating a roadmap for your program. On that note, Happy Optimizing! 

In this guide to eCommerce conversions, we will look at 15 actionable tactics you can implement to stand out among the competition and get shoppers to fall in love with your online store.

Download Free: Improve Conversions In 60 Days Guide

1. Reverse engineer the customer journey

The customer journey tracks the steps a potential buyer goes through from getting interested in your niche, becoming aware of your brand, finding out more about your product to making a purchase. Most online depictions of the customer journey make the process appear simple. It is usually represented linearly and consists of 5 stages – from awareness to retention.

The reality of the customer journey is a lot messier. People skip steps, rush to purchase, or never come back to your website. Yet while the customer journey is messy, there are analytical tools that help you understand where visitors enter your eCommerce store, where they drop-off, and the common paths they take to finally make a purchase.

One of the most used tools for analyzing the on-site customer journey on your website is Google Analytics. You can create custom dashboards in Google Analytics that help you visualize how people move around your eCommerce site, the landing pages through which they discovered your product pages, and where there is a significant drop-off.

A comprehensive analysis of how visitors move around your eCommerce store and in and out of each stage of the customer journey can help you identify their pain points so you can rightfully tackle them through A/B testing.

2. Optimize your site speed

One of the simplest methods to increase conversions is improving the page load time. The reason for this is pretty straightforward; if a page takes a long time to load, your store visitors get impatient and leave the website.

The graphic below precisely illustrates the correlation between page load time and conversion rates.

While this chart comes from a study on general conversion rates, there is also a large body of data about how page speed impacts eCommerce conversion rates specifically. Amazon’s study on how even milliseconds of latency affects revenue is probably the most cited example. Every 100 ms of latency costs the company 1% in sales, they claimed.

Portent conducted a study on page speed that revealed some interesting insights for eCommerce store owners. They found that the highest eCommerce conversion rates occur at a page load speed of 0-2 seconds.

When it comes to page load time, some pages are naturally more important than others. The most important ones include the homepage, checkout, product, category, and login pages. For any page where you receive a lot of traffic, you should prioritize optimizing.

3. Simplify navigation on your store

All the best eCommerce stores are flat and extremely easy to navigate. ‘Flat’ means having as few layers as possible to your site design – everything on your site should be accessible within three clicks of the homepage. More importantly, you also want to make it as simple as possible for site visitors to get from the core landing pages to the product pages and checkout page so that making a purchase is as seamless as possible. 

Just like longer page load times cause shoppers to walk away from your store, a labyrinthine site design also tends to frustrate them, leading to drop-offs. There are numerous ways to optimize your menu to improve eCommerce site navigation. You could start by including breadcrumbs, simplifying the options on the menu, prioritizing elements, and so on. The ideal solution will be specific to your eCommerce store.

Let’s understand the same with the example of Slideshop. After thoroughly analyzing their data, the teams discovered that shoppers weren’t clicking on the subcategory. To improve usability, they ran an A/B test on the side menu to create a better flow from categories to subcategories. They got rid of the promotional right sidebar and introduced a left navigation bar. Here’s a look at the control and variation from the test: 

The variant with the navigation menu on the left increased the add to cart clicks by 34%. The case study stands testament to the fact that smooth navigation is closely linked to increased sales for any eCommerce store.

4. Offer personalized shopping experiences

Your customers today demand shopping experiences tailored as per their preferences and likes. And the more data you can collect about your customers, the better you can predict and optimize their online shopping experiences. Even if you are just getting started, you can target some low hanging fruits such as showcasing similar/frequently bought together items on product pages.

This is an excellent way to start as it doesn’t require any data collection from a potential customer, only from previous visitors to your site. However, as an eCommerce business, you should look to take it further. For example, user cookies allow you to show product browsing history, while geo-targeting allows you to provide a personalized shopping experience based on the visitor location.

5. Provide clear pricing upfront

The number one reason for cart abandonment is hidden and unexpected costs. Shoppers hate to be bombarded with additional charges that show themselves only during the last stage of the checkout process. While it may be tempting to lure in potential customers with a seemingly low price and then add on extra costs at the point of purchase, this is sure to lose you business. 

Whatever you are selling, the best method to increase conversions is to be direct about prices from the first instance. And this includes shipping costs, taxes, and fees. This helps build trust among buyers.

6. Enrich product pages with relevant copy and descriptions

It is widely accepted that effective copywriting and concise, appealing product descriptions are crucial to building trustworthy relationships between businesses and customers. Buyers don’t require an instruction manual on product pages. However, they do want all of the relevant product information to be easily accessible. 

You need to find that sweet spot for your product pages. The last thing you want is a customer leaving your site to find out more information about an item elsewhere.

Good copy can be quirky as well if it suits the seller’s brand identity, like the example above from the eCommerce store Woot. When writing copy, use the kind of terms your customers would use, speak to them in their language, take inspiration from positive testimonials to incorporate the same lingo in your copy that your buyers are likely to use.

Download Free: Improve Conversions In 60 Days Guide

7. Use scarcity and urgency to boost sales

Scarcity and urgency are two emotional drivers that are known to boost eCommerce conversions. By highlighting that your stocks are limited and likely to get sold out soon, you immediately attract buyers’ attention and get them excited about your offerings. Shoppers sometimes also go ahead and make a purchase solely because the product is limited edition. You want to create enough buzz around your products so you can leverage that. 

Creating a sense of urgency is to highlight that a particular offer or deal is valid only for a short period of time, so shoppers are lured into quickly bagging it before they lose out on the great offer.

8. Add live chat support

Getting your queries resolved is hard enough even when you’re in a store with a salesperson in front of you, ready to answer your questions. Moving the process online only makes it tedious and leads to higher chances of drop-offs due to unresolved queries or unsatisfied shoppers. Did you know that 73% of consumers prefer live chat over any other communication channel to interact with a business?

Offering live chat on your site can help ensure that no customer leaves your store to find answers to their questions, and human interaction is not completely done away with. Live chat offers the potential of an immediate solution to shoppers regarding any kind of issues pertaining to the products, return policy, seller information, and so on. Even if they don’t use it, there is a reassurance that it’s there.

9. Test your pricing strategy

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed more than 13,000 people to understand their spending habits. They classified participants into three groups – tightwads, unconflicted, and spendthrifts. Here is how the respondents were grouped according to their answers.

While the overwhelming majority of people feel unconflicted about making a purchase, almost one in four of your potential customers probably fall into the tightwad group. You can use different eCommerce pricing strategies to appeal to these people and convince them to hit ‘Buy Now’ on the product pages. Even offering free shipping and returns can be extremely valuable in persuading customers to make a purchase.

The example from Zalora, an eCommerce site, nicely illustrates this point. They ran an A/B test to see if emphasizing free returns would increase the conversion rate. The answer was yes. The variation, which started with the word “free,” outperformed the control by 12%.

10. Add product reviews

As per BigCommerce, 69% online shoppers want eCommerce stores to share more product reviews. Therefore, make sure your product pages are sufficiently enriched with customer reviews as buyers tend to look for social proof before making up their minds about a product. Customer reviews improve the credibility of your store and legitimacy of the products and give users the vote of confidence that their shortlisted products have been used and liked by others as well.

11. Work on reducing cart abandonment rate

Cart abandonment is one of the biggest challenges that eCommerce stores face till date. The average cart abandonment rate for the industry ranges from 60-80%, depending on the niche. Since any decrease in your cart abandonment rate can directly translate to an increase in sales, it makes sense to direct a significant amount of your optimization efforts towards battling this issue.

There are many strategies that you should test, which can decrease the rate of cart abandonment. Some of the most straightforward ones include: 

• Cart abandonment email sequences that regularly remind shoppers about the items they have left behind
• Having an omnipresent cart icon on your site so visitors are always reminded they have pending items and can navigate to the cart page in a single click
• Cart abandonment push notifications that retarget lost buyers and try to nudge them to complete their purchase

12. Simplify the checkout process

While there is no one size fits all solution, simplifying the checkout process would majorly involve reducing the number of steps, removing all distractions from every page, offering multiple payment options, and providing guest login, so customers don’t have to necessarily input all details to quickly make a purchase. These will help you get started and ensure customers don’t view checkout as a tedious, cumbersome process that they’d rather not take on. 

If you want to go further and rely on a structured, step-by-step approach, consider the common problems online shoppers have. Addressing each of these points, either sequentially, or at once, will no doubt help you optimize the eCommerce conversion rate on your checkout page. Here’s a look at some of the most common ones as per Baymard Research. 

13. Add relevant trust badges to your site

As the statistics revealed in the graph above, trust is a paramount concern for potential customers while considering making a purchase online. While trust impacts all types and sizes of eCommerce websites, it’s especially problematic for smaller stores that don’t have enough brand recognition as yet. 

Using trust signals and badges on your homepage can go a long way in improving your brand credibility and getting more visitors to place their trust in your products. There is a substantial body of evidence that shows that trust badges on a product or checkout page increase eCommerce conversions. If you are still unsure, It’s definitely something you should consider testing. There are two things to keep in mind when running such a test:

1. What trust badges you use
2. Where you place the trust badge

There are three types of trust badges you are likely to use. The first relates to the payment options. The second is security badges. Lastly, you have industry certification. While all three categories are important, be sure to not overdo it by adding too many badges and leading to a cluttered page that does more harm than good.

14. Provide multiple payment options

As we’ve discussed, the fewer obstacles during your checkout process, the higher your sales. Since everyone has a select few payment options they absolutely trust, providing multiple payment options ensures that you cater to maximum audience, and no one drops off solely because they cannot find a trusted payment method on your store. In fact, providing a plethora of payment options can recoup 30% of sales that would have been lost to declined cards. 

Remember that simplicity is key through the checkout process. There is no need to display a whole menu of card types that can be visually unappealing, although it’s certainly in your interest as a business to accept as many different types of payment as possible.

15. Leverage upsell and cross-sell opportunities

Upselling is convincing interested buyers to go for more expensive products or products with upgrades and add-ons. Cross-selling is selling additional, often related, items to a customer along with the item they intended to purchase in the first place. The goal of both upselling and cross-selling strategies is to increase the average order value.

There are numerous ways you can increase your conversion rate and average order value. An obvious example of a company that uses cross-selling to increase customer average order value is Amazon, as illustrated in the image above. You could offer free shipping above a certain price point to incentivize people for adding more items to their cart.

Wrapping up

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to increasing conversions on your eCommerce store. What works for your business will be specific to your vertical, store, target audience, and products. However, the 15 tactics shared above will more likely than not work for most businesses and deliver remarkable results when it comes to uplifting your conversion metrics. As always, the best way to implement an effective strategy is to test every major change before you deploy it universally to measure its impact on your unique business. Sign up for a free trial by VWO to get started with testing on your eCommerce store and rely solely on data for all optimization decisions. On that note, we urge you to put the above strategies to practice and optimize your online store for more sales.

Download Free: Multivariate Testing Guide

Multivariate testing is not only restricted to testing on webpages but is used in a range of marketing fields. One of the simplest types of multivariate testing is run on PPC ads. For example, a standard Google Ad that appears in your search has two elements you can test; the headline and the copy.

Say you made two versions of the headline and two versions of the body copy. A multivariate test for such an ad would have 4 variations:

Multivariate testing with PPC ads is relatively easy as you are just modifying the headline and copy. There are a limited number of variables. 

On a webpage, there are a lot more elements you can test. This makes it incredibly important for you to craft your hypothesis carefully. The larger the number of elements to be tested, the more would be the number of variations.  

The important thing to note here is that more the number of variations your test has, the larger would be the required sample size to run it successfully. This means you either need more visitors, or the test will take longer to reach statistical significance as compared to a simple A/B test.

Clearing the confusion – multivariate vs. A/B testing

The world of testing can be confusing, and you might often find yourself conflicted with regards to choosing the right approach for your business and its unique requirements. Let’s understand the key differences between A/B testing and multivariate testing so you can confidently decide when to use which one.

In an A/B test, versions of a single element are created to deduce which one drives a higher positive impact on conversion rate. For instance, if you decide to run a test on the CTA text of your product page, it qualifies as an A/B test. Each of your variations will have a modification of the CTA text. 

However, if you decide to run a test on the headline, image, and form of your landing page together, each of your variations would comprise a variant of each of these three elements. Therefore, this will help you conclude which combination of these three elements has the highest positive impact on your key metrics. 

While A/B testing is pretty much a question of either/or, multivariate testing can get quite complex when it comes to zeroing in on the best version of a particular page. 

Another key difference between the two is that the variations tend to be strikingly dissimilar in an A/B test, which is not so much the case in a multivariate test. Since there are so many variations, in MVT, you might not notice many stark differences between some of these. The overall look and feel of each variation is far more visibly contrasting in A/B testing as it focuses on one big change rather than multiple small changes. 

Time and traffic requirements are also quite different when running A/B and multivariate tests. Since A/B tests have fewer variations, you will need far less traffic to reach statistical significance as compared to running multivariate tests. This also means that an A/B test can be wrapped up way sooner as there are only two options, while an MVT would undoubtedly take longer given its high traffic requirement and higher number of variables. 

Why should you go for multivariate testing?

Multivariate testing allows you to drill down and see exactly which combination of your critical website elements yields the best results. The changes in a multivariate test are more subtle than those in an A/B test, but give you an insight into how key elements can work together to drive significant improvement in your conversion rates. Multivariate testing, therefore, is best deployed when you wish to optimize landing pages, your homepage, or any other critical page without having to go for a complete redesign.

Another crucial benefit of multivariate testing is that it saves you time as you test multiple variables simultaneously as opposed to testing them iteratively and measuring the impact of each. You also get to measure how each of the variables interacts with one another and impact your overall goal.  

In this regard, multivariate testing is an efficient method for quickly testing a range of variables. Case in point is the following success story from Hyundai.nl. 

Hyundai Netherlands had a simple goal of improving the conversion rate of their car landing pages. These pages were critical as people could request test drives or download brochures here. Since they had multiple ideas to optimize these landing pages, they decided to opt for multivariate testing, wherein they tested the following: 

• SEO friendly copy vs. original copy 
• An additional CTA vs. a single CTA
• Large photos of the cars vs. thumbnails

Here’s a look at the control and variation from the test: 

The results of the test were extremely impressive. The winning version of the page generated a 62% uplift in conversion rate and a 208% increase in click-through rates. 

Running this as an A/B test would have wasted a significant amount of time, which equates to lost revenue for a large company like Hyundai. Multivariate testing not only allowed the test to be run in a shorter time period, but also generated valuable results. 

Download Free: Multivariate Testing Guide

How to get started with multivariate testing

Any form of experimentation requires dedicated effort and a coherent approach. The steps to run an MVT are similar to those for running an A/B test. Below is a framework you can use for getting started with multivariate testing:

1. Identify a visitor pain point based on quantitative and qualitative insights gathered
2. Formulate a solid hypothesis to solve for it
3. Create variations for the MVT
4. Determine your sample size and configure your visitor segments 
5. Define your conversion goals 
6. Set up the test and start driving traffic to your control and variations 
7. Run the test until statistical significance is reached
8. Analyze your test results report 
9. Draw insights and learnings from your test

Use your website data to identify the problem area, and then pinpoint the elements you want to test on the particular page to solve for it. Go ahead and formulate a strong hypothesis that tackles all these elements based on your understanding of your target audience and the available data. 

Once you have designed all your variations, you are all set to configure your visitor segments and define your conversion goals for which you wish to measure the impact of your variations. Finally, go ahead and create your MVT and be sure to run it until statistical significance is reached. Use VWO to easily set up your MVT using a Visual Editor and without writing a single line of code. Sign up for a free trial to assess it for yourself. 

Finally, analyze your test results to determine the winner so you can deploy the winning variation universally. Also use the insights drawn from the test to learn more about your target audience and streamline your optimization pipeline accordingly. 

This is the approach Microsoft Office took when they sought to optimize their conversion rate by testing multiple versions of their landing page.

The agency that undertook the project decided to test the hero shot, title, description, call to action, and the resource links on their landing page. Here’s what the control looked like: 

They then ran a multivariate test. After testing a combination of elements, the one below stood out to be the clear winner. The test results revealed a 40% increase in conversions from this design over the original.

What is interesting about this multivariate test is that it also helped the teams analyze the relative importance of the various elements of the page. Rather logically, the call to action stood out to the most important one and had the maximum influence on their conversion rate.

The test results of this case study are a testament to just how effective multivariate testing can be in not only increasing conversion rates, but also providing valuable insights on how various elements of a page interact with each other and which one is relatively more important for you.

Multivariate testing – a vital tool in boosting conversion rates

As this guide has illustrated, multivariate tests can be an extremely useful tool in helping you test radically on your critical pages to drive dramatic improvements to your key metrics and thus your top line. 

So, if you are looking to optimize the landing page for your next big marketing campaign to make it a lead magnet, you can rely on multivariate testing to tell you which version of the page you must go ahead with. It’s time to get started and put the theory to test on your site!

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

1. Define your site’s goals

Before setting out on your conversion rate optimization journey, it is important to set website goals that you want to measure conversions and optimize for. These goals could be any particular action that you want the visitor to take on your site that generates certain value for your business. Once you have created them, you must assess visitor behavior against these defined goals. 

Below is a list of some of the most common conversion goals that you could set for various web pages:

• Page visits
• Form submits
• Click on links
• Clicks on elements
• Custom conversions

VWO Insights allows you to create goals as per your unique requirements and track visitor behavior for them so you can direct your website optimization accordingly and aim for improved conversions. For instance, if you want to assess how a CTA button on a particular landing page is performing, you can do so by simply assigning a goal for it.

2. Collect and analyze visitor data

When it comes to CRO, it’s best to avoid assumptions and estimations, and rely solely on data for all decision-making. 

Constantly track and analyze your website data to learn more about your visitors and their preferences. It’s this data that should inform you where to direct your optimization efforts. 

Following are some key data points that you absolutely must track to understand your visitors: 

• Data on traffic and traffic sources
• Details of user behavior on your landing pages
• Bounce and abandonment rates for web pages and forms
• Click-through rates of adverts and marketing campaigns
• Information on return customers and average order values
• Net promoter scores (NPS) or other customer feedback

Once you have collected quantifiable data, use it to create your user persona, which is a representation of your ideal user. This must highlight all valuable information about your target prospects and users, including their interests, likes, dislikes, goals, and pain points. 

The combination of quantifiable data and your ideal user persona will help you devise hypotheses to run insightful tests to better understand what works and what doesn’t on your website.

3. Perform competitor analysis

To have a competitive edge over your rivals, you need to know what their strengths and weaknesses are. You can then use that information to highlight your USPs and strengths over your competitors’ weaknesses. 

Also, keep in mind that people research their options before making a purchase. They’re going to check out your competitors and how you measure up to them. By performing competitor analysis, you also get to step into your customers’ shoes and pit yourself against your competitor just the way your potential customers would. You can then focus your efforts on ensuring yours is the best site and product range they’re going to find. 

4. Assess your current conversion funnel

Before you set out to fix what’s broken, be sure to understand in detail what a typical user journey and conversion funnel on your website looks like. This will help you gauge where visitors are hesitating and dropping off and the plausible reasons as to why that may be so. 

You can use VWO Insights to track conversion rates across your funnels and identify specific stages in the journey where users might be losing interest so you can accordingly optimize them. At each stage of the funnel, you will have a natural drop off resulting from people failing to take the next step in the funnel for multiple reasons. You can then decrease that drop off by devising solutions to those probable reasons to nudge people down the funnel, thus boosting your conversion rate. 

For example, one of the stages where eCommerce stores focus their optimization efforts is checkout, where an average of 69.23% shoppers are known to abandon their carts. A higher conversion rate, however marginal, will be a significant contribution towards tackling this pressing issue. A prominent example of a site that has improved its eCommerce conversion rate by simplifying its checkout process is Amazon with the one-click checkout.

To understand and optimize your funnels, you need to assess what your site does to move potential customers through the set stages. How are you leading them to a conversion? Where do you lose most visitors? By learning these answers, you know where to focus your efforts to increase conversion rate.

Watch how to use VWO funnels to leverage visitor behavior.

5. Define and clearly highlight your value proposition

Your value proposition is a concise explanation of why a user should buy from or subscribe to your products/services over your competitors. Therefore, the first step towards getting visitors to convert is to clearly convey to them what sets you apart and why buying from you is a good decision. Clearly stating and reinforcing your value proposition through multiple site elements can work wonders for your conversion rate.

Your value proposition should come across through your headlines, images, and copy and should primarily feature your Unique Selling Point (USP). Repeated marketing experiments recommend that your USP should be summarized in 10 words or less.

Let’s take Evernote as an example of how they redid their value proposition to bring out their product USP. 

Their original tagline was “Remember Everything.” It nicely described the benefit that users could gain, but not the functionality of the tool they offered. Below the tagline, they highlighted 3 product features that illustrated how their tool works.

Here’s a look at their redesigned page:

It’s a succinct tagline that arguably better describes the functionality of the tool, while the text underneath the tagline further builds upon the value proposition. Before deciding which one to go with, be sure to craft multiple headlines, and A/B test them to find out which resonates the most with your target audience and influences conversions.

6. Optimize layouts of your critical pages

If your conversion rates aren’t improving despite repeated efforts, it’s a sign that you need to introduce a radical change in your page. Try altering its design and layout based on insights from visitor data and best practices to see if your conversions get impacted. The principles of high-converting page design are based on a body of material and case studies that reveal how people use websites. Tools like eye tracking, scroll maps, mouse tracking, and clickmaps can provide you with insights on how visitors are browsing through your website. Use these to create a page that visitors love to engage with.

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

7. Apply sales copy best practices

Improving conversion rate is often about making your website sales copy more persuasive. Repeated case studies have shown that making even small improvements or tweaks to your copy can influence your conversion rate. 

There are many elements of sales copy you can and should test; the most important one being the headline. David Ogilvy, the founder of the global marketing firm Ogilvy, was famously quoted as saying,

Five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents of your dollar.

Therefore, start by testing your headline and see if you can drive a noteworthy improvement in your conversion metrics. 

Here’s an example from imsider.ru where they ran a simple test on the headline of their sign up:

By merely stating the time-specific benefit of their services, the headline on the right helped generate 9.52% more conversions over the one on the left.

8. Build trust with reviews and testimonials

If your potential customers don’t trust you, they’re not going to convert. To build trust, the low hanging fruit you can target is showcasing customer reviews and testimonials to increase your credibility. 

Consider the VWO homepage, for example. It shares a customer’s success story along with their photo, review websites’ trust badges along with logos of well-known global brands that use VWO. All these elements add up to build trust and confidence among visitors in the credibility of the brand.

Research and multiple case studies have shown that visitors who interact with a review are 58% more likely to convert.

That’s a vast benefit to gain from merely popping some testimonials onto your pages. There is a lot to consider when experimenting with testimonials. The case study below for a sales page nicely illustrates how a change in the location of a testimonial can increase your conversion rate.

Of course, the way you use testimonials should relate to your goal. LKR Social Media, a VWO customer, used A/B testing to increase email signups. By using a testimonial for the headline, they got a 24.31% increase in conversions.

9. Make site navigation simple and seamless

Visitors land on your site with a purpose and your job is to make it as easy as possible for them to find what they are looking for. Make sure that navigating your website is intuitive and user-friendly to increase its usability, thereby nudging visitors to convert. You want to remove all friction in user experience and make it seamless for visitors to understand how to buy from you or otherwise convert immediately.

You may also want to consider adding a search feature to your site. Visitors who use an internal site search tend to convert at a much higher rate than those who don’t. That’s because the users of the feature are often people who already know the product or service that they want and have a much higher purchase intent. You don’t want these visitors to bounce from your site because finding that product wasn’t as easy as it could be. 

10. Improve page load time

Pages that take too long to load get abandoned by potential visitors in short order. Such immediate abandonments can hit your conversion rates hard. 

Research shows that you should shoot for page load times of no longer than four seconds. Even within that range, the shorter the time, the better for your conversions. Reducing your page load time will ensure fewer and fewer impatient visitors bounce before the site has loaded. Some ways to improve the speed of your pages include eliminating large images and leveraging AMPs. 

11. Test everything before deployment

One of the most methodical ways to make data-backed optimizations to your pages and reduce risk is testing. When you make changes to your pages, you must track and assess their impact before deciding if they actually work well for your conversion rate. A/B testing allows you to pit your hypotheses against the original version of a webpage to find out which one positively impacts conversions so you can deploy it universally. This way, you will rely on your visitors to choose the one that resonates better with them and avoid making decisions based on assumptions. Try VWO Testing to create versions of your webpages to discover the best-performing ones that positively impact your conversion rates.

Conclusion

To increase your conversion rate is to improve your marketing ROI. The more visitors you convert, the higher is the impact you drive on your top line from your existing traffic. The tactics mentioned above are a great place to start to strategically improve your conversion rates. Having said that, keep in mind that some of these are likely to drive better results for your business than others. The important thing is to define your goals, gather data, and continuously run objective tests to find out what resonates with your target audience.

Note: The author owns screenshots used in the blog.

In this exclusive webinar, Rishi shares his nuggets of wisdom on copywriting and how to harness its limitless potential in boosting conversions. 

Rishi talks about how he discovered his passion and knack for copywriting and what his professional journey of over a decade has looked like. He emphasizes leveraging copywriting as a conversion catalyst and shares some actionable insights and tips for writing copy that converts.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

Following are the key takeaways from the session:

Rishi’s introduction to copywriting

Rishi was initially never a copywriter. In fact, he stumbled upon copywriting while working in CRO. Over the years, he discovered that while running A/B tests, copy was seldom the focus. However, his own tests based on ideas and hypotheses around copy always had the best statistical outcomes. And that’s how he came to realize the importance of copy from a conversion perspective and began to focus on it.

The underestimated power of copy

To illustrate the power of copy, Rishi shared an example from one of his clients, Walkin Wheels, where his team used a rather unconventional approach to redo their category page. 

Originally, the category page featured their star products, highlighted their features, and had bold CTAs to direct visitors to the product pages. Rishi’s team decided to run an experiment to see how the visitors would respond if the page highlighted the story of the brand instead of marketing any products at all. 

They removed the products from the page, added a ‘See Products & Details’ CTA at the bottom, included videos, a picture of the founder, and a team picture. The new page focused on what the company is all about and why they exist. By making the brand’s story the hero of the page, they noticed an uplift of 28% in their conversion rate.

This success story is evidence that copy can make a remarkable difference in conversion rates. However, in order for copy to do so effectively, it needs to be optimized and well thought-through. And the first step towards writing copy that converts is understanding buyers’ psyche. 

Rishi shares the 12-point checklist that he has been using for years to write impactful and conversion-oriented copy. 

Buyers are skeptical of ‘too good to be true’

Buyers are extremely wary of any unrealistically great offer or even surprisingly premium features of a product that might seem too good to be true. Even the fact that you are way better than your competitor might potentially be a disadvantage if you don’t address it, as buyers might doubt that an offering as good as yours could be a hoax.

Therefore, whether it is in terms of product quality, features, or even your terms and policies, anything that could come across as unrealistically good should be appropriately addressed in your website copy.

Buyers find expertise sexy

Buyers are drawn to experts’ opinions, and as a brand, if you can demonstrate your expertise, it would add to your credibility and get buyers to trust your word. However, merely stating that you are an expert isn’t enough. Your copy must reflect your competence and convince the visitors that you are an industry leader. 

Take this example from Casper. The headline reads, ‘We slept on more than 60 different pillows to find a fill that thrills’.

They are clearly demonstrating their expertise. And when you are on this page as a potential buyer, you know that this pillow is the best because they’ve tested all the other alternatives out there.

Shoppers are influenced by implied messages

While you want your copy to be crystal clear, you also need to bear in mind that explicitly stating everything in detail might end up doing more harm than good. It’s always advisable to treat your prospects as smart individuals capable of filling in the blanks, and if you let them draw their own conclusions, you have a better shot at getting them to convert. 

Here’s an example of a headline that reads ‘There are over 120 energy drinks on the market. We’ve tried them all’. Compare it to an alternative headline that says, “There are over 120 energy drinks on the market, ours is the best’. 

While the first headline is subtle, the second one is the stated option where the marketer is spoonfeeding readers the idea that their brand is the best. According to Rishi, this is very ineffective. As much as possible, you want to go for the implied version of your copy and let customers fill in the blanks.

We root for people who beat the odds

As humans, we are fundamentally wired to root for those who beat the odds, and as a brand, you want to make sure your story reflects how you overcame certain challenges to get where you have. Every business has some or the other instance where they have beaten the odds, and this sometimes gets overshadowed by their achievements. 

Rishi suggests that you recollect such instances in your journey and incorporate them into your copy. Once done, your copy will speak volumes to your visitors about who you are as a brand and what you stand for. This works wonders in helping you form a deeper connection with them.

Readers and buyers love surprising details

Rishi believes that there are always tons of surprising and exciting details about any product that can get visitors interested in it and willing to engage with the brand. Discovering what those are is the first step of the exercise. Introspecting, talking to your team, and interviewing your customers can enlighten you with interesting details about your products that even you might find surprising. 

Editor’s tip: You can also run On-Page Surveys to collect first-hand information from your visitors on their preferences. 

Once you have created a list of those, make sure your copy reflects them so you can utilize every opportunity to surprise and delight your audience and get them interested in your offerings.

We are visual animals

Since visuals are far more successful in capturing human attention and invoking an emotion, Rishi strongly encourages supplementing text with visuals wherever possible or using copy to evoke powerful visuals that elicit the desired reaction from your audience. 

Editor’s tip: See how visitors are engaging with the images and copy on your page with Heatmaps. Start your free trial today!

Buyers need the motivation to break a habit

This point is a reminder that no matter what product or service you are offering, there will always be people ready to turn it down. It could be because they are in denial of the problem, or have already figured out a workaround for the same. In both these cases, you need to motivate them enough to go out of their way and consider your offering. 

Editor’s tip: Use Funnels to see where people are dropping off and find out why. Take an all-inclusive and guided 30-day free trial with VWO Insights. 

Rishi, therefore, highlights that in most cases, your competitors are not just companies who sell the same product or service. You are also competing against the lack of motivation among your prospects to consider a new way of performing a certain task or recognizing a new problem that might require a solution. And addressing this adequately in your copy will work to your advantage by highlighting the real need for your product and motivating your audience. 

The example Rishi shares is that of a company selling hybrid exercise bikes. Their competition is not other companies that are also selling adult hybrid exercise bikes, but people who use workarounds because they have figured out other ways of being healthy. They might run on a treadmill, go for a jog outside, or do other forms of exercise. 

However, if they use a treadmill or go out for runs, one of the downsides is that they might be hurting their joints as research shows that running on the road or a treadmill puts a lot of pressure on joints, whereas bikes ease that pressure. 

So, Rishi’s hypothesis is that instead of talking about competitor bikes or how amazing your own bike is on the product page, why not talk about the fact that it puts a lot less pressure on your joints if you ride a bike? That’s a much more persuasive message because you are trying to compete against you running on a treadmill and not other brands.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

Shoppers love personalized experiences

Rishi believes that personalized experiences can go a long way in uplifting conversions. Not everyone in your target audience might have the same preferences; therefore, try to personalize your product page or sales pitch copy to accommodate for different segments in your audience group and engage better. 

Rishi shared an example of how his team redid the product page for an air purifier brand. They acknowledged that the page receives two kinds of visitors. Some very methodical people appreciate technical details about the product, and then some merely want a quick summary. And so they decided to create two versions of their sales pitch copy for the same page. 

They redid the product page and asked the visitors, ‘How much time do you have?’ If they clicked on ‘I have two minutes’, they showed them the shortened version of the sales pitch. And if they selected, ‘I have time’, they presented the more detailed version of their sales pitch. This test improved sales of this product by 30%, and it happened solely by personalizing experiences for the consumer.

Buyers love the idea of discovery

People enjoy discovering something rare and exclusive that most others don’t have access to. It makes them feel good about themselves and instills a sense of achievement in them. Therefore, if your copy can position your product/service as something rare and make your audience feel as if they’ve stumbled upon something worthy, they are most likely to stick around and explore it.

We buy from people we like

Rishi emphasizes the fact that since the buyer and seller are socially distant when it comes to eCommerce, it can be tough to create a relationship deeper than a transactional one. Therefore, he believes that website copy must be leveraged impactfully to communicate your brand’s authentic personality and inject a sense of likeability towards the brand so that the customer enjoys interacting with you.

Editor’s tip: A/B test your site copy to figure out what makes your audience click.

Buyers are curious

While leveraged extensively in advertising, buyer curiosity is something copywriters can benefit from even for creating delightful digital experiences. Rishi highlights that humans are naturally wired to be curious, and as a copywriter, one must ensure that the copy they write invokes their visitors’ natural sense of curiosity that entices them to explore your offerings.

Rishi’s advice on:

Telling a story with constraints on the number of characters

Rishi believes that limitations around the length of the copy aren’t something that should hold copywriters back. In fact, he encourages letting the buyers decide the type and length of stories they want to read and urges copywriters to figure out a clever way of asking them if they want to skip to the important stuff or have time for a detailed pitch. And irrespective of the choice of the buyer, you must customize your copy for both scenarios. He adds that you mustn’t have one sales pitch and force-feed it to every buyer because every buyer is different.

How to keep quirky content from being misinterpreted by the audience

The cornerstone of giving your brand a personality is letting your authentic and human self shine and reflecting it in your copy. Rishi emphasizes that if your brand is a quirky one, go ahead and ensure your copy reflects that. However, if that is not the case, do not force quirkiness in your copy (even if it improves conversion rates), it’s fake. 

The bottom line is that buyers’ purchase decisions are more often than not driven by emotion and are based on likeability. They are drawn to brands that are not afraid of showcasing their authentic personality to their customers. As a brand, the closer you are to being your authentic self, the higher your chances of striking a chord with your audience are higher. 

Copywriting for a B2B business: Does the same checklist hold true?

Rishi believes that as long as you are selling to humans, whether it’s a committee of humans or an individual, the same copywriting principles apply. While certain aspects would inadvertently require modification for a B2B environment, the fundamentals of the checklist remain the same. You are still addressing a human in a different context, and therefore, it majorly boils down to fitting the checklist pointers in context for your brand and figuring out what works best for you.

Crafting conversion-centric copy within SEO constraints

Rishi thinks that while writing copy, SEO deserves paramount importance. He also believes that creativity blossoms within limitations and these constraints are what bring out the best in a copywriter. He goes on to admit that some of his best work has been produced within one constraint or the other. 

VWO and copywriting

We integrated Open AI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo API with our Visual Editor so that every time you decide to run a test or deploy a change, you can generate copy recommendations in a language of your choice. This means you cut down on time spent brainstorming on variations and alternatives by having a library of AI-generated ideas available at your disposal. 

Whether you are looking to optimize headlines, CTA text, product descriptions, or any other text on your site, you can quickly generate alternatives and either directly deploy them or test them against your original copy, both without any developer help. Either way, by automating this aspect of experimentation, you make your CRO program more efficient and agile. You can start a free trial straight away to check this feature for yourself or request a demo from our experts. 

If your site is powered by WordPress, you need no introduction to the endless range of A/B testing plugins and tools that enable you to optimize it for conversions. Just like WordPress is a platform known for its robustness and ease of use, using a tool like VWO makes A/B testing an easy and effective technique that helps you outdo your website user experience and grow your key metrics. By simply installing a plugin on your WordPress site, you can run as many tests on the critical elements as you need to confidently make data-backed optimization decisions. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

In this post, we discuss how you can leverage A/B testing on your WordPress site and how it can be a game-changer for your business.

What can you test on your WordPress site?

Headlines

While there are several golden rules and best practices you can follow while writing interesting and impactful headlines, testing them could surprise you to no end. Run A/B tests on your headlines to see which ones drive more traffic to your posts, engage your readers better, result in a higher number of social shares, and more. VWO’s GPT-3.5 Turbo-powered AI copy generator allows you to choose from a large set of headline suggestions based on the existing copy on your website. You can check this feature by taking a 30-day free trial.

Forms

Website forms are indispensable for any lead generation business, and optimizing them can have a direct and tangible impact on your conversion metrics. However, given the wide scope for refinement and sometimes contradictory best practices, forms can be quite challenging to optimize. What works for one niche might not necessarily work for yours, and the only way to find the sweet spot between insightful answers, high attempt rate, and frictionless filling experience for your forms is to run experiments. 

Consider contact forms, for instance. From testing for the required and optional form fields, the form length, placement of the form, there are a plethora of parameters for which you can streamline your forms and get better results.

Call-To-Action (CTA)

A lot rides on those big, bright, attention-grabbing buttons that prompt desired responses on your pages. The color, placement, size, copy – you want everything to be perfectly optimized for maximum conversions. Test them out before you commit to a particular variation of a CTA to be confident that it will drive better engagement.

Page copy

Your page copy is critical. You need to ensure it is persuasive, impactful, conversion-focused, and yet centered around your target persona. While you could just hit the jackpot and write a copy that checks all boxes, zeroing in on the one that perfectly resonates with your audience is usually a virtue of methodical testing. So, whether you are revamping old WordPress pages or creating brand new ones, go ahead and test out the copy before you finalize on the one, to watch your conversion rate go up, to the north, and beyond!

Widgets

Widgets are the cornerstone of any well-built WordPress site and play a major part in improving its functionality and adding new features. Whether it is search, social media, or a subscription widget, the placement, size, copy, and design can directly influence your conversion numbers. Experimenting with multiple variations will ensure you choose one that adequately draws visitors’ attention and helps them fulfill their purpose.

Images & illustrations

Text-only content has a retention rate of 10%, but when supplemented with the right kind of visuals, it increases the retention rate for the piece of information to 65%. Massive, right? So, testing your graphics becomes all the more important. You can experiment with them on your posts, home page, and landing pages to see which ones cause an uptick in your critical metrics and optimize your pages like never before.

Themes

Themes determine a majority of the layout and visual of your WordPress website, and altering the same is an absolutely critical decision. To avoid leaving any scope for guesswork or instinct, be sure to test your shortlisted variations before making one live universally. While themes can only be tested on the server-side, it is worth going that extra mile as they form the cornerstone of your site and greatly determine its usability. 

Menu layouts

The site menu directs your visitors to important pages on your website. Its layout is critical as it can directly impact user experience and conversions. Therefore, to facilitate ease of navigation within your site, you must continually optimize your menu layout to figure out which layout helps your visitors seamlessly browse and take the desired action. 

Design & layout

It can be overwhelming to narrow down on a website design that highlights all essential elements, provides clear information, along with being de-cluttered and engaging. Therefore, A/B testing the critical elements such as images, white spaces, navigation bar, color scheme, etc. can help you zero in on the optimized version of all your pages, in alignment.

Benefits of A/B testing your WordPress site

Keep data at the forefront of all decision-making

In today’s day and age of consumer-centricity, the closest you can get to making foolproof decisions w.r.t. optimizing your digital experiences is by relying on testing to validate your hypotheses. Once you decide to base all your optimization efforts on the data gathered via A/B testing on your site, your digital experiences evolve from being dictated by opinions, biases, or guesses to being driven by data, clarity, and facts. No matter how big or small the conflict, you can always bank on testing for a logical and objective answer.

In one of the sessions in VWO’s online summit, ConvEx, Lukas Vermeer, Director of Experimentation at Booking.com, spoke in length about how the travel behemoth manages large-scale experiments. One particularly interesting segment was where he highlighted how leadership at Booking.com encourages making data the cornerstone of every decision. Here’s what he had to say:

It’s pointless to allow teams to run experiments if you’re not willing to listen to what they find. This puts an enormous onus on leadership because it means that as a leader, you need to be willing to say that ‘I think this is the direction our product should go but I’m not sure, I don’t know and please show me how I am wrong, what assumptions I’m making that are incorrect. What I think or my ego is less important than ensuring the product offers a good user experience and that users want to use the product’. To put your own opinions and ego below the data that the people in your teams are going to find is something that I’ve rarely seen and I think that really is the hallmark of an exceptional leader and I’m happy that is something that we have here.

His insights clearly indicate how testing facilitates rational decision-making in an organization and how great leaders value data way more than individual opinions.

Improve ROI on existing traffic

The amount and quality of traffic you drive to your site depends on your marketing budget and numerous other factors in your marketing strategy that might be beyond your control. However, testing rigorously helps you find optimization opportunities on your site that enable you to deliver better experiences to your existing traffic. This, in turn, improves your conversion rate and fetches better ROI from the same traffic. What’s important to note here is that even minuscule tweaks made to your site can attribute to a significant impact on your critical metrics, and testing is a powerful approach to validate it for yourself before you make any change.

Eliminate friction in user experience

Measuring user experience on your site can be tough. Very often, it’s impossible to gauge what exactly could be breaking your site’s experience and causing poor conversions, drop-offs, abandonment, etc. And even if you do, you wouldn’t want to go ahead and make any decision before being absolutely sure of your hypothesis. 

Therefore, once done with user research leveraging tools such as Website Analytics, Heatmaps, Surveys, Session Recordings, you can build your hypotheses based on the insights gathered, and finally, validate them using A/B testing. This way, you can ensure that every change you make solves visitors’ pain points, eliminates friction from your site experience, and reflects positively on your conversion metrics. Sign up for a free trial by VWO and assess it for yourself. 

Watch how to formulate a testing strategy using UX research data.

Reduce risk associated with making drastic changes

Let’s say your research tells you that your website is outdated, and you are now looking to revamp it. This is a huge move that could go either way. You could hit the bull’s eye and create a site that fixes all pain points, attracts visitors, and delightfully engages them, or create one that does more harm than good. A risk like this can be completely avoided if you opt for an evolutionary redesign (wherein you build each element on top of the previous one) of the site and test each major change on a segment of your audience before making it live universally. This will save you from making any radical change live for your entire visitor base before you are completely sure of it.

Uncommon Knowledge tested its redesigned landing page, and the results received were highly unanticipated but extremely insightful. 

Scotland-based psychology training company, Uncommon Knowledge had a straightforward objective – to increase sign-ups of free videos they offered to improve awareness of their brand and offerings. In order to do so, they completely redesigned the sign-up page. Here is the control and variation of the same: 

They gave up their traditional magazine layout to implement a rather sleek design that explicitly assured visitors that their privacy would be respected and they could opt out whenever they wanted to. 

The results of the test were quite unexpected. The original landing page delivered 19.55% more leads than the new, fancy one. The team was surprised and learned a lot about their audience by analyzing the A/B test results. They drew the conclusion that since a majority of their audience was more than 45 years old, they were unaffected by the latest design trends. Instead, they preferred the original page design that gave them some idea about the videos in the pack compared to the variation that just told them that it’s a three-pack video set on trauma management. 

Testing one landing page taught the team at Uncommon Knowledge about their target audience and helped them avoid the risk associated with implementing the new design throughout their website. 

Stay ahead of the competitor curve

Standing out among the competition and making a unique impact on visitors’ minds is a challenge every business struggles with. While your site is a reflection of your beliefs, ideologies, and offerings, it must strike a chord with your visitors to get them to take the desired action. Experimenting consistently on your site will ensure you keep customers at the forefront of all your optimization efforts, which will inevitably keep you ahead of the curve.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

How VWO enables you to optimize your WordPress site

VWO Testing is a part of the all-in-one VWO Experience Optimization platform. It is a robust experimentation tool that allows you to create and run tests on your WordPress site with an easy-to-use Visual Editor. You don’t need to write a single line of code – all you need to do is integrate VWO’s dedicated WordPress plugin on your site, and you can run unlimited tests without any page tagging. Not just that, VWO Insights combines session recordings, heatmaps, form analytics, and website surveys so you can analyze your visitors’ behavioral attributes, and accordingly streamline your optimization efforts. 

VWO empowers you to test each and every element of your WordPress site, run simple to complex tests, segment and run tests based on your visitors’ behavior, test with an entire library of ready-to-use widgets, slice and dice test results, create custom segments in reports, and so much more. It is a one-stop solution to shaping delightful user experiences that positively impact the UX and conversions on your site. 

Sign up for a free trial to explore how you can leverage VWO Testing to optimize digital experiences on your WordPress site, effortlessly.

How to use VWO Testing to run A/B test on your WordPress site

With VWO’s easy-to-install plugin, you can create and run as many A/B tests effortlessly on your WordPress site, without writing a single line of code. All you need to do is integrate the plugin with the WordPress dashboard by following these steps:

1. Search for the VWO plugin in the WordPress directory or simply download it here. 
2. Follow the plugin installation steps mentioned, extract the .zip file, and transfer them to your site’s /wp-admin/plugins/directory.
3. Activate the plugin and enter your VWO account details into the configuration page as prompted. 
4. That’s it. You can now create and run A/B tests using VWO on your WordPress site by following the steps mentioned here.

Conclusion

Optimizing your WordPress site is an iterative process of constantly learning about your visitors and methodically evolving the experiences you offer. While there are numerous ways to go about it, A/B testing is the data-backed path to optimization that validates (or disproves) your hypotheses by allowing your actual visitors to convey to you what works. Relying on this statistical approach for decision-making can help you discover improvement opportunities and make more changes to your site that positively impact your bottom line. So, before you make any minute or drastic change to your site, putting them to the test will ensure you can do so with confidence, regardless of the outcome.