Always be testing.
That’s what the best internet marketers are doing today. And what they all recommend.
Maybe a blue button will get more people to buy than a green button. Maybe a link with “Click Here” converts more than “Download Now”. But we will never know until it’s tested. That’s where A/B split testing comes into play.
What is A/B Split Testing
A/B Split Testing: It’s the process of testing two pages and seeing which one converts more visitors (whether it be more sales, more emails signups, more link clicks, etc.).
There’s a lot of theory behind A/B testing (this article has a great overview of A/B testing
).
Today, I want to show you HOW to set up an A/B test in WordPress.
Below is a video tutorial, and below that, a text version of the tutorial.
Before we begin, you’ll need two things:
A Google Analytics Account (click here to learn how to set up and install)
Google Content Experiments plugin
Once you have a Google Analytics account (and added the tracking code to your site) and installed the Google Content Experiments plugin
, it’s time to set up our experiment.
Setting Up an A/B Split Testing Experiment
In an A/B test, you need three pages:
Your original page
Your experiment page (the one where you’ve made changes)
The conversion page (usually the thank you page after a sale or email signup)
Go now and create these three pages in your WordPress site.
For this tutorial, I’ve created simple sample pages for my site:
Test Page 1
Test Page 2
Test Page Confirm
Now that you’ve created your pages, login to your Google Analytics account.
On the left hand side, click on the Experiments link under the Behavior tab.
Next, you want to insert the URL of the original page and click “Start Experimenting”. For my site, I will use Test Page 1.
Next, you can begin filling in your options for the experiment.
First, give your experiment a name. It can be whatever you want. It will be used for your own tracking purposes.
We will discuss objectives in a moment.
You can choose what percentage of traffic to send to experiment. This is useful if you just want this to be a small test so that most of your traffic will still see the original page.
Lastly, select if you want to receive email notifications. Most likely, you’ll want this.
Now, for objectives.
In Google Analytics, you can set Goals. There are many types of Goals (read more about Goals here
), but the objective I use the most is a destination objective.
Click Create a New Objective (unless you already have Goals set up, in which case you can use the “Select a Metric” tab).
Setting Up Goals in Google Analytics
Goals, in this case, are the pages a user arrives at after completing a task. Such as a thank you page. For this example, I will use my Confirm page.
Give the goal a name (this again is internal and can be called whatever you want).
Select “Destination”. This will make the Goal a specific page.
You can click “Next Step”.
Enter the URL of your confirmation page (you don’t need to include your domain name. See how in the screen shot below, I didn’t include http://www.mywpexpert.com. Just the part that comes after that).
You can leave the other settings the same and click Create Goal.
Once your goal is set up, you can navigate back to your Experiments page.
Configure the Experiment
Next, we want to tell Google what our Variation page is (the test page).
In step 2 of the set up, you’ll enter the URL for the variation page and give it a name, such as I did below:
Finishing Content Experiment Setup
In step 3, you will receive your experiment code.
Click “Manually insert the code”.
You will get a long code. This is the code we will add to your site. Copy this code.
Now, go to edit your original page in WordPress. The plugin we added to your site will add a new box at the bottom of the page, such as in the image below.
Check the box and then paste your code here.
Once the code is added, go back to Experiments. The final step will validate that the code is entered and Google Analytics is receiving it.
Once it’s validated, click “Start Experiment”.
You’ll then be taken to the tracking page below:
It will be blank for now. But once visitors start visiting your page, you will begin to see your data here.
Deciding the Winning Page
Google will tell you when one of the pages is the winner and which is the loser.
If your new page converts better, you can use that. Otherwise, stick with the original.
Now, as I said in the beginning, always be testing.
You should try testing out different variations of your pages. Test your headlines, your body copy, colors, etc.
Test as much as you can and see if you can increase your conversions.
You now know how to run A/B tests on your WordPress site.
If you’d like to learn even more, here’s a great book on A/B split testing (please note, it is an affiliate link):
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