A/B testing, split testing, bucket testing, oh my! Have you ever wondered how to a/b test landing pages? Have you ever wondered what the difference between multivariate testing of landing pages and a/b testing two landing pages is?
If you are in the digital marketing world, you have probably heard it all.
Whether you have chosen to avoid A/B testing like the plague because it conjures up repressed memories of middle school experiments, or you are familiar with what a/b testing landing pages can accomplish, but simply don’t think it will help you reach your goal of high converting landing pages, you have come to the right place.
Never fear, HighLevel is here to shed some light on the A/B testing of landing pages conundrum, giving you a complete guide and roadmap to success!
We’re going to address:
- The Problem: Your Landing Page Isn’t Improving Your Conversion Rates
- Your DIY Fix (Spoiler Alert: It Doesn’t Work)
- Enter A/B Testing
- What It Is & How It Works (Step by Step Guide)
- Why You Need To A/B Test Your Landing Pages
- A/B Testing & Beyond with HighLevel
The Problem: Your Landing Page Isn’t Improving Your Conversion Rates
Picture it: 2021. You just created the coolest landing page (or funnel) in existence for your company or client. You are stoked to get it live, so you publish it and eagerly await for the conversion rate to skyrocket.
You wait and wait, and nothing happens, so you double-check that everything is up and running as it should be. Even though it appears to be spectacular, your conversion rate results are anything but as shown by your conversion rate.
Call it a Catastrophe
Because it is! There’s nothing more disappointing than putting hard work, time, effort, and money into creating a beautiful landing page or funnel that doesn’t pan out in a goldmine of ideal conversion rates.
Where do you go from here? You do have options!
- You can try making some adjustments to the landing page elements you have built to see if anything else works better at improving your conversion rate.
- You could scrap the entire landing page and build a new one.
- You could become obsessed with funnels and start a collection of them so large you need to build a warehouse in the Nevada desert to contain them all… wait, that’s a different kind of funnel. Maybe we should stick to calling them landing pages to avoid that confusion.
Regardless of how many options you have available for your landing page (slightly outrageous or not), there is one choice that seems to be the only way. Or at least the most common path taken after this typical trial and error between landing page variations.
Your DIY Fix for Existing Landing Pages (Spoiler Alert: It Doesn’t Work)
Now that you have sold off the last of your funnel collection, you can get back down to the business of conversion rate optimization.
Is the issue the sign-up form? Maybe a marketing automation gone wrong? Perhaps you chose the wrong target audience or you should have used different images. It could even be more than one element on the same page!
After you have examined all the various aspects of your landing page, you probably have some new ideas of individual elements that you would like to change to see more conversions, generate leads, and bring in enough traffic to increase sales.
This is a commendable thought process, but it is still not likely to have the positive impact you are wanting.
It is way more than just one important element at play. There are so many various factors that affect how successful a landing page is.
Some of the aspects of landing pages that need to be considered are:
- Call to Action (the CTA button & if it results in the desired action)
- Headline Copy (as well as body copy)
- Design Colors (understanding the statistical significance and psychology behind them)
- Targeted Keywords (utilizing statistical analysis to determine the best keywords)
- Various Offerings (is it an online course? is it bullet points of the services you provide?)
- Imagery/Graphics (being careful to fine-tune your visuals to add and not distract)
- Placement of Elements (you can use testing tools and Google Analytics to determine a hierarchy)
- and More!
One of the Lucky Ones? Or Struck Out Again?
It is impossible to predict how each variation of these factors will affect a landing page’s success. Sometimes, landing pages require changing just one word.
You may get lucky and adjust the right one randomly, but the chances of this happening are lower than the odds of winning the PowerBall on your birthday, which also happens to be a once-in-17-years “Triple Your Winnings Tuesday!”
Sounds a little far-fetched, right? So does attempting (and failing) to create your way to a successful landing page one variant at a time.
Enter A/B Testing & Split Testing
DIY landing page troubleshooting failed; now what? We’re so glad you asked. We know that you have a lot on your plate. No, we haven’t been spying on you at your very own work-from-home employee appreciation pizza party.
We’re talking about that plate that is piled high with responsibilities, leaving not a lot of room for an adequate side of free time. Trying to create a landing page that gives you more leads at the same time is just bonkers.
We’ve Got You Covered
Fret not; we have your free time and the success of your landing page in mind.
While you may have disregarded a/b testing or split testing or multivariate testing previously because it sounds like digital marketing meets high school chemistry, we understand. Especially when words like “testing tools” and “losing variant” come into play.
We also understand that you could miss out on quality leads and conversions because you won’t perform an a/b test on your landing page. How many visitors are you willing to risk losing?
Up your odds of winning big and gaining more visitors. Capitalize on the hard data behind the a/b test and start testing your landing page NOW!
What The A/B Test Is & How to AB Test Landing Pages
Let’s look at an example first.
Imagine you went to the eye doctor for a new pair of glasses. Instead of testing to see what your new prescription might be, they put you in a new pair and tell you to wear it for a month. You do this and decide that it’s not quite where you want it to be.
So your eye doctor performs the same test, puts you in another pair of glasses with a slightly different prescription, and tells you to repeat the process. Again, there’s a little improvement, but you are still far from the goal.
If you had to go through these steps repeatedly, having one test after another performed, you would arrive at the finish line completely exhausted. Thankfully, this example is not reality.
Instead, you compare options and results in real-time, allowing you to figure out the best prescription for you much faster.
This is exactly what the process is for A/B testing landing pages.
Out with the OLD, in with the A/B Test!
Say NO to:
- Building out a landing page
- Tracking the conversion rate over a month or two
- Making adjustments after that period of time
- Wait a month or two to test if the updated landing page performs better than the original page
- Rinse and repeat and test and repeat and test and repeat and test
Say YES to:
- Building two versions of a landing page
- Running an a/b test of them side by side, simultaneously
- Analyzing real-time data from both the original version and the new landing page
- Having the ability to test which landing page is more effective at creating conversions and bringing visitors
- Selecting the more successful landing page to go live
- Saving time and money that you can now put towards buying the coolest waffle maker on the market (because you know which one is the coolest, you read all the product descriptions) and starting a specialty food cart
Okay, so maybe the food cart dream won’t become a reality quite yet, but the waffle maker (the other half of the dream, and honestly the most important part) is definitely doable. If waffles aren’t your jam, there are plenty of other reasons you need to use A/B testing for every landing page you create with HighLevel!
Why You Need To A/B Test Your Landing Pages
Maybe you understand the concept of A/B testing, but you still aren’t sure you really need to utilize this test. After all, you have a pretty good idea of what your visitors are looking for, right?
While this may be true, when it comes down to deciding on crucial aspects of your landing page, for example, the Call to Action and where to place it, or making sure the colors are visually stimulating while not being too harsh and the verbiage expresses urgency but does not invoke panic, or even just that the form fields are comprehensible by all your visitors, being able to test a few different options can be extremely beneficial before deciding on one version.
Reasons to consider A/B testing as a part of your landing page (and regular page!) building process:
Saves You Time
A/B testing your pages eliminates the need to individually create the first version of and test different landing page designs, often one element at a time. Instead, you are dedicating time to creating the test, letting it run its course, and then capitalizing on the page that performed better.
Get the results from your test much faster, saving valuable time.
Saves You Money
A/B testing for your landing pages, home page, contact page, product pages, and more can drastically decrease the number of times you make adjustments. Reducing these edits also reduces the money spent on redesigning the entire page.
In addition, a split test will consolidate your promotional spending instead of investing in several campaigns. Money saved is money earned, and this is a huge benefit of A/B testing.
Saves You a Headache
When you try to make adjustments and test the success of your landing pages over and over, the data can get a little discombobulated in your noggin. Making comparisons between different variations is often difficult.
With A/B testing, you can compare the results in real-time, side by side, so you can accurately gauge which one is performing better and has more visitors.
Saves You Some Trouble
What happens when you make adjustments to a landing page, and then upon rechecking the conversion rate, you discover it is performing worse than the original version?
If you are only building a landing page, making adjustments, and moving on to the next test and adjustments, it can be almost impossible to revert back to all of your former design elements and landing page settings.
However, when you are split testing, you can make comparisons as it is happening, without losing the design you are comparing it to.
Saves You Stress
When it comes to the success of your landing pages, consider how many moving parts make up the entire picture. One URL often has more things to keep in mind than you may realize.
Suppose you are individually testing each landing page you create. It can be challenging and stressful to determine whether the differences that occurred between the two tests were a direct result of the adjustments made.
Saves You the Unknown
There are outside factors that must be considered when you are testing at different times.
For example, seasons, holidays, events, promotions, and so much more can affect the success of a page and how many visitors it gets.
Because so much goes into building landing pages and their success, changes that you notice with your landing page may not even have anything to do with the efforts you have put in.
A/B Testing & Beyond With HighLevel
Ready to start building your landing page success?
HighLevel makes it easy to A/B test your pages. While this feature is similar to some other solutions on the market *cough cough* clickfunnels *cough cough* crazy egg, there are many reasons why HighLevel is superior:
- Capability to adjust the percentage of traffic and visitors directed towards each variation
- Pay the same amount for unlimited landing pages
- User-friendly interface
- Less glitchy experience
- Automatically creates a new path for landing page variations
Better. Faster. More Strategic.
It’s pretty obvious (at least to us!) that HighLevel’s A/B landing page testing simply can’t be beaten. Step aside, ClickFunnels and Crazy Egg, one-trick ponies were so last year.
With all of these benefits, you can get a more accurate picture of what’s working and what’s not, and you will be getting it a lot faster.
This allows you to declare a winning landing page at an earlier stage of your marketing strategy, so you can hone in on that target market and what they are looking for.
Want to start creating more quality conversions with your landing page? Run an A/B test that follows these suggestions!
Best practices:
- Test different headlines to see what grabs (and holds) attention
- Change colors of elements or the entire color scheme (color psychology comes in handy!)
- Try out different CTAs and the placements of them on the page itself
- Shift the attention, focus, or various offerings to see if some promotions are more successful in attracting visitors than others, even with the rest of the page being exactly the same
- Keeping the same framework may be beneficial to have if you want to reference back to it at any point, and switch out specific elements
Want to take it a step further and capitalize on your potential conversions even more? Check out all the other awesome features HighLevel offers, such as utilizing an exit popup and installing the HighLevel Webchat Widget on your landing pages!
Validate Your Landing Page Content With a Webchat Widget
Unfamiliar with what these tools accomplish? They both gauge your audience’s interactions with your landing page, albeit in their own ways.
The Webchat Widget gives you an opportunity to communicate with landing page visitors in order to determine if they are getting all the information that is needed to make a purchase or action decision. This solution allows for these people who have questions to ask them directly on the page instead of leaving and looking elsewhere.
For those of us who understand the need to know more before committing to buy, this solution makes perfect sense. It can be frustrating as a consumer having to dig around for the answers that aren’t there. Being able to ask these without even leaving the page is crucial!
Not to mention, when you start gathering the questions your potential consumers are asking, you start to get a better idea of the changes you can make to your landing page during the a/b testing process.
Take Another Swing As People Leave Your Landing Page
Exit popups are another effective way to keep visitors on your website longer and to keep them from bouncing. These popups serve as an extra “at bat,” giving you another chance to grab their attention and sell them on the product or service that you provide. These typically have a softer call to action, and often come across as less abrasive and urgent than the main CTA.
What are you waiting for? Stop letting your landing pages fail and set yourself up for success with A/B testing! Have more questions or want to learn how to utilize HighLevel for your business? Get in touch with us, we would love to connect!
