What is Sitecore A/B Testing? Importance of Sitecore A/B Testing

Sitecore, having one of its services related to marketing automation, also allows A/B testing. In this blog, you will understand in detail what A/B testing is, what is Sitecore A/B testing, and what is the importance of Sitecore A/B testing.

When you are getting Sitecore development implemented, they allow you to have the functionality of A/B testing. First of all, let us understand in brief A/B testing.

A/B testing is testing changes and modifications in a webpage or content by showing the users different variants of a web page or content to determine which one works best for achieving the objectives behind those webpages and content.

A/B testing is also called split testing because it randomly tests different variants of the webpage and content against the current webpage and content. The goal here is to improve conversion rates through pushing the best webpage and content to the users.

By conducting A/B testing, you can optimize your website without guessing because your decision-making process will be based on results and data and analysis.

As the name of the test itself suggests, A/B testing requires two variants: A and B. There are two versions created of the same page and then they are tested against each other.

Version A is called the control and version B is called the variation. Each of the versions has live traffic and each of their effects and results are measured to find out both of their conversion rates. Only one element is changed only one time as it will help you gain certainty over which variable it was that produced the conversion.

For starting the A/B testing, you have to identify the goal or the objective behind the test. After that is decided, you have to select the pages of your website that will help in achieving the goals that you set successfully.

You can test various elements of your chosen pages for testing and check if there is any improvement in the conversion rate or if the goal is achieved or not.

Let us take an example to break down this concept in a simple, layman’s explanation.

There is a company called Clothes Inc. They have a retail web store for selling their products. Their main goal is to increase their sales and in return, increase the revenues and profits. Their marketing team is focusing on the purchase screen of their website. So, they conduct A/B testing on their webpage where the visitors come to purchase clothes.

Variation A (the control) is kept with red-colored “Buy now” buttons on the products. Variation B (the variation) is kept with blue-colored “Buy now” buttons on the products. Now, by setting up A/B tests, both of these variations are pitted against each other. Once they have had a fair share of visitors on this webpage, they can decide on a winner.

How do they decide on the winner? When both of these variations are pitted against each other, they check the end-results of both of the web-pages. Whichever ones are able to bring more conversions is declared as the clear winner.

It is a very important component of any customer experience management system to have site testing and continuous optimization. This is why Sitecore offers a simple tool that allows you to run tests on your website pages. It can run tests on the entire page, content and its elements.

Sitecore A/B testing is one of the most effective methods to reach your business goals. It allows you to analyze the performance of different versions of the same page and verify on real-time traffic when the variations are changed.

You can go for A/B testing or you can also go for multi-variate testing. A/B and multi-variate tests will allow your marketers to effectively improve the digital marketing content and information that goes out on your website or any other platforms.

Below are the steps to set up the Sitecore A/B testing:

• Create an objective that you need to achieve through this testing
• Create components with different versions of the same context
• Create templates that will store the data of each component
• Create a data source also of the components
• Register your goals and objectives based on actions that will be taken by the users when they visit the webpage

Basically, you have to go to the experience editor in Sitecore, select components and click on new variation and add new variations to be tested against the original components.

Sitecore also provides a brilliant tool called Path Analyzer which helps you in assessing your site’s performance. It enables you to have a quick view as well as analysis of the pages that are performing well and pages that are performing poorly.

It is a very useful tool for digital marketers as they can examine and modify or replace their content to improve their conversion rates.

Here is why A/B testing is so important, significant and useful in your business:

• A/B testing gives you the power of making decisions based on data for your website optimization.
• Instead of doing guess work, you know what works for your website and what does not.
• You can measure the impact of changes on your website.
• It allows your visitors to see various, different versions of your website and allows them to choose.
• With constant testing and optimization, you can increase your conversion rate as well as leads, revenues, footfalls on your website.
• Your teams will have valuable insights and reports about the visitors on the website.

Through Sitecore A/B testing, you can analyze and optimize the way your content, elements, webpages and the entire website works. It gives you a sneak peek into how the minds of the users work and what they prefer.

You can analyze and find out what works and focus on optimizing it to its best in order to give out the best to your website visitors.