This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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How can you use A/B testing to improve your website conversion rate? This is a very helpful question. I'm gonna do my best to give a very helpful answer. A/B testing is where basically you send people to two versions of your website and see which one converts better. So if you're selling something, this is really, really important.
Often things like headlines or price or the main image that you use on your webpage or a few other elements, I'll talk about them in my answer, make an enormous difference. And if you change one of them, all of a sudden you're converting at a much higher rate, which means that your overall sales are higher, which means you're bringing in new customers or more new customers, I should say. So optimizing your website is a great thing to do. Very, very helpful. How do you actually do it?
That's what a side hustler here wants to know. Tom in Boise. Let's talk about the basics of A/B testing and how it can help you boost those conversions. As I said, all important goal. If you wanna make more money or just improve pretty much any metric in your business, this is a great way to do it.
So let's talk about it. A/B testing after the quick thank you to our sponsor. [Music]
Hey there, this is Tom calling from Boise, Idaho. I've been running a website, my e-commerce business, but I'm struggling with a low conversion rate. I've heard that A/B testing can improve conversions, but I'm not sure how to do it.
But what elements should I focus on testing first? And how do I analyze the results to make the right decisions? There's probably some easy tool to do this, but I just haven't found it yet. [Music]
Hey Tom, thanks so much for bringing this up. I talk about it at least once a year.
Probably should mention it more often because it is such a simple and important thing that people can do. And it's not just big companies. Big companies do this all the time. They're always running constantly a number of tests because they understand, if they're getting a ton of visitors to their website, well, if they could improve conversion even by one or 2%, they're gonna make so much more money. Well, you might not be getting as much traffic as Amazon or some other big business, but if you can improve things, you can often improve things with A/B testing a lot more than 1% if you've never done it before.
So some key elements. So first thing we wanna do is figure out what is it that we want to test? Most important thing is your headline. In fact, that is by far. I would test five to 10 different versions of my headline over and over to try to get the best one before I changed anything else.
People often are like, "I wanna change the color of my order button to see if that makes a difference." It might make a tiny difference. And again, for companies like Amazon, that's great. But for your simple sales page purpose, a different headline or text, the main call to action, those are the things that tend to make the biggest difference. But you can also then, once you've got that down, you can also try testing images as mentioned, maybe try testing a video. Everybody thinks video is better, is it?
Well, ultimately your customers will decide. So if you make a video and you're all excited about your video sales page, make sure you test that against a non-video page. Ultimately, sometimes the way that people, if you ask people like, "Hey, which page is better?" They might say something, but really what you wanna measure is how do they convert? Like what causes them to actually click that convert button or buy or sign up, subscribe, whatever it is. So you're gonna identify a few variables like that, could be other things.
Then choose a tool, an A/B testing tool that will help you do this. Now, the great news is there are platforms like Google Optimize, Optimizely, Crazy Egg. Those are a few of them. They have really simple options for beginners. They provide robust A/B testing capabilities.
And these are either free or low cost. Crazy Egg, I think I mentioned, it works for a lot of big businesses, but they have a small user version as well. And then a lot of A/B testing tools integrate smoothly with your website platform like WordPress or Shopify. So they basically have an interface where you can do it and set up the experiment. So it doesn't have to be terribly complicated.
So you use those tools, you identify those variables. And one quick note, make sure you're testing one variable at a time. You don't wanna run five different A/B tests because then you don't know, like maybe the conversion shoots way up or goes way down, but you don't know which variable caused it to do that. So one variable at a time, get enough data, see what happens, then change to the version that worked better. And then you can keep doing it.
Like I said, you could do it five to 10 times on a headline. What is the absolute best headline? Try more, find out. And then make the change. And then try some other tests.
Just always be running one test and you're gonna get a lot better conversion over time. Definitely a huge thing that lots of small businesses should be doing more. Tom, again, thanks for raising that question. Listeners, thank you for being out there. sidehustleschool.com/questions.
You can ask a question there. There's also resources for every episode. There's a bunch of fun stuff and I'm making more fun stuff. New episode every day, in fact. Big thanks to our production team led by Chuck Reed.
Big thanks to you, our listeners, for being out there and much more is coming up. That's all for now though. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
