3 Questions to Ask Before A/B Split Testing

‘- Hey everybody, I’m Levi here at WebMechanix and I’d like to talk to you today a little bit about CRO. That’s conversion rate optimization.

Now, CRO is the act of actually refining your website in ways that make it so your users take the actions more frequently that you want them to take. Maybe it’s filling out a form or downloading a PDF or something like that.

Now if you’re like most people, you probably have a list of a hundred different things you want to fix or change or move around on your website and that’s perfectly fine.

And if you’ve actually gone as far as writing that stuff down, you’re probably ahead of the game. But how do you prioritize that list?

How do you come up with what is gonna have the best impact and what you should do first?

Well, I’m gonna give you three things that you can look at that are gonna help you prioritize those things and make sure that you’re hitting the ground running.

Alright, so there are a lot of different formulas out there on the web on how to prioritize, how to build your roadmap, and that’s fine. They all really come down to these three things.

Okay, so let’s roll through them.

Number one, what is the potential impact that it’s gonna have? Okay, you’re gonna have that whole list. Is this test gonna be something that is really going to move the needle or get your numbers up to where they need to be or is it just gonna be an incremental, slight change?

So you want to make sure you’re measuring that.

Number two, how much of an impact is it going to have on the value? Right, so your pages that have the most important traffic and have the most value that they add to your business are probably the pages that you’re gonna wanna pay attention to most.

So, you know, if you’re trying to determine whether or not to optimize something on an about us page or maybe on a product page, you can see how those two might differ and how the value is gonna be higher for the product page instead of the about us page.

And number three, you want to make sure that you’re paying attention to the ease of implementation. Alright, that means how much time is it gonna take?

And for that, you’re looking at, is there a development side to this? Do you have to get a dev team or an IT person involved to make this change? And then also, on the business side, how long is going to take to even get approval to do some of these things?

How much red tape are you gonna have to possibly go through? Or is it just something that you know your team can pick up and move on right away?

Those three things are gonna have a very important role in you determining what the priority is for the different tests you have.

Now I’m actually gonna add a fourth one to this list that you should always write down, is common sense. After you’ve got your list, if you can look at some of those things and say, ‘You know what? That’s just best practice, I don’t need to test.’

Always be cognizant of that.

So if there’s something that needs to change, because you just know it does better than what may already be there, don’t be afraid to highlight that and make those changes as they are needed. But again, just to reiterate, you’re gonna look at the potential impact it’s gonna have on your metrics or your key performance indicators.

You’re gonna look at what it’s going to do for the value of the page that you’re working on.

Is it an about us page or is it a product page? And then you’re also gonna look at the ease of implementation. Is it something that you can get up and moving quickly or is it something that’s gonna take awhile to get going?

So with those, best of luck and have fun with your CRO.