Beginner’s Guide to A / B Testing for Landing Pages
Many businesses just build a landing page based on assumptions about what they think will trigger a response from their audience. If you’re not A / B testing your landing pages, you run the risk of missing out on valuable leads and conversions.
Yes, businesses can probably make an educated guess about what will resonate with their visitors. But they will never know what definitely works until they conduct thorough testing. Basing your landing page off a ‘feeling’ can have costly results. Rather than relying on guesses and assumptions to make important decisions, businesses should invest in A/B testing to ensure they’re achieving the best results.
The best practises for landing pages are always evolving. It’s vital that your business evolves its approach too. The continuous process of optimisation should be built upon a solid framework of testing and experiments with different content and styles.
From completing sign-up forms to booking an appointment to discuss your services, its important businesses know how to maximise the conversion rate on their landing pages.
Why?
Because even the smallest of changes can make a big difference. Even just a few small tweaks to the design, content or calls-to-action can lead to increasing conversion rates. Conducting A / B testing on your landing page lets you uncover what version of a landing page achieves more clicks, greater conversions and a decreased bounce rate.
What is A/B Testing for Landing Pages?
A / B testing, commonly referred to as split testing, is a marketing experiment in which a business shows half of their audience one landing page and the other half another.
For the A / B test to deliver accurate results, two variations of the landing page should be created – with one single variable change.
What’s an Example of a A / B Landing Page Test?
Maybe your business is looking to see if amending the colour of your call to action button increases the click through rate for your ‘enquire now’ form.
To test this theory, you would need to create an alternate web page that is exactly the same as the original except that the call-to-action button is a different colour. Then, you would test the two colours to see which achieves the highest click-through-rate.
Even a simple change, like altering the colour of a call-to-action button, can cause big improvements in your conversion rate.
What You Can Test on Your Landing Page
The reason we recommend only testing one variable at a time is to ensure you understand your results.
If you test your layout and call-to-action at the same for example, then how do you know if the layout or call-to-action (or a mix of both) caused a higher conversion rate?
While every landing page is unique and there are broad range of variables a business could test, the popular ones are:
1. The Layout
You might find rearranging the elements on your landing page results in a higher conversion rate. Even slightly altering the layout by swapping a piece of content to the right, left, up or down could generate promising results. Consider experimenting with the placement of:
- – Paragraphs
- – Columns
- – CTA buttons
- – Images
- – Videos
- – Product descriptions
- – Bullet points
- – Reviews
2. The Call to Action Button (s)
Your call-to-action prompts your page visitors to do something. It quite literally calls them into action. The action you want could be anything, from downloading your eBook, subscribing to your mailing list or buying a product.
Because your call-to-action is so important, it deserves special attention to ensure it’s achieving the highest conversion rates. There are multiple aspects you could test including:
- – Background colour
- – Font colour
- – Font style
- – Font size
- – The wording
- – The placement on the page
3. The Headline / Copy
Copy still has an impact – even with the rise of video and imagery.
Your copy usually details your offer, important information about the company, product details and any other necessary or useful information.
Your headline needs to be to-the-point and engaging. Even replacing a verb to a more commanding one could result in more conversions.
Once you’ve tested your headline, work your way down the page and experiment with different sections of copy. Consider altering the wording, trying different copy lengths, adding adjectives and speaking directly to the reader.
4. Images and Video
While you don’t need to use image or video on your landing page, some businesses do to elevate their page and make it more engaging.
Maybe test adding, subtracting or substituting your imagery / video against your existing version to see what causes more action.
Your Offer
Every landing page needs something to offer to the visitor. It’s what you offer your visitors in exchange for something else. Whether it be their email address to send them an eBook, a free consultation in exchange for their contact details or a product.
Experimenting with your offer will help you uncover what your target audience actually want. Your offer could be anything from a discount code to a free consultation – but testing will help you know what kind of incentive increases conversions.
The Importance of Picking One Variable
As you begin to exam your landing pages, you might find that there are many variables you want to experiment with. But to see how effective a change is, it’s paramount you isolate only one variable and measure its performance before conducting a new test on a different variable.
Of course, you can trial more than one variable for a landing page – but they need to be tested one at a time.
The Top 4 Benefits of A / B Testing for Landing Pages
1. To Increase Conversion Rates
Conversions are usually the whole point of a campaign. If you’re not generating enough conversions or your rate is decreasing, it might be time to consider modifying your page.
Many businesses like to think they know their audience and website visitors inside and out. But, it’s important to recognise than it’s impossible to know your audience as well as you think you do without understanding what triggers a response from them on your website.
2. To Increase Your Sales
Not only can experimenting with your landing page increase conversions, it can also improve your number of sales.
Any alteration to your landing page that can boost the amount of people going through your sales funnel will increase the bottom line of your business. Through A / B testing your landing page, you could find that more people complete a sale when the ‘buy now’ button is in a darker colour, for example.
3. To Gain A Solid Understanding of Your Audience
If you aren’t collecting data from your target audience, then you’re missing out on potential leads and sales. Learning about your landing page visitors requires your business to create an environment in which you can seamlessly collect valuable data.
Through the use of A / B testing on your landing page, you can see which elements cause your audience to act and which don’t. Perhaps making a simple change to the layout, like moving a piece of content from the bottom of the page to the top, could deliver behaviour patterns about your target audience that you never would have known.
Ready to Get Testing?
Nobody wants to lose against the competition.
Businesses are always competing with one another for the best landing page experience, the most conversions and the highest sales. No matter what industry you’re in, A / B testing your landing pages gives you a competitive edge.
A landing page is only valuable if it’s generating targeted traffic. Without this ability, your landing page is useless. To see results – you need to have a fully optimised PPC campaign.
And that’s where we come in.
Let’s Have a Chat
Get in touch for a free, no obligation consultation and discover how we can get targeted visitors to your landing page.
Book a meeting: michaelgoldman.co.uk/
Telephone: 0161 706 0004