Step 1 – Create a Page Variant

Starting with a copy of your existing page is the easiest way to start a test.

The basics of A/B testing are that you run different versions of your page – called variants – side by side with a series of changes in each variant. The idea is to see which one converts the best.

You can run as many variants in your test as you like (e.g. an A/B/C/D/E/F/G… test) but the more variants you have, the more traffic you need to send to your campaign to be confident that the statistics are not a coincidence.

To create a variant:

• Open a page from your Pages tab
• Click one of the two big buttons in the A/B Test Centre to duplicate an existing variant (easiest method) or create a variant from a blank page

That’s it! You now have 2 page variants  that you’ll use as the basis for your test.

Step 2 – Decide WHAT to Test

Now we need to decide what you’re going to change on your new page variant. Here are a few suggestions of page elements that are worth testing:

• The primary value proposition or campaign message
• Your hero shot – the main photo or product shot
• The body text that describes the details of your offer
• Your bullet points (features & benefits)
• Change the wording of your primary Call To Action (CTA)
• Change your lead gen form

You can change just one thing or change many at once to create a completely different page.

Changing many things at once might produce a more dramatic change in conversion, but will provide you with less causal information than just trying one thing at a time. It’s totally up to you.

Step 3 – Decide HOW to Change Your Test Elements

Now that you’ve decided which page elements you want to test, you need to think about *how* to change them to give you a conversion lift.

Looking at the list of elements in Step 2, you could try some of the following things:

• Make your lead gen form shorter (ask for less information)
• Give your lead gen form a more prominent position (higher up the page and try it on the right-hand side)
• Simplify the page with less text, or separate it into bullet points for greater clarity (as an exercise – try removing 50% of your page copy)
• Make the CTA bigger
• Add a directional cue (such as an arrow) that points to the CTA to draw attention to it

Successful manipulation of emotional and physical response is your key to conversion success. By utilizing some principles of design you can start refining your pages.

For more design ideas check out this blog post: Designing for Conversion – 8 Visual Design Techniques to Focus Attention on Your Landing Pages

Step 4 – Watch the Stats and Promote a Champion

 

Now that you’ve created one or more new page variants you need to start the test. To begin your A/B test follow these steps:

• Assign each variant some traffic (weight). To do this, click on the 0% beside your variant (in the weight column) in the A/B Test Centre, input the % weight you want to assign that variant, then press enter to confirm the changes. You can assign as little or as much weight as you like. Note: the more traffic you give it the faster you’ll gain confidence that your test results are valid. For a test with one Champion page (the original one) and one variant, you can just try doing a 50/50 split.
• Publish (or re-publish) your landing page
• Start driving traffic to your page. Note that you will only ever have one URL for this page – Unbounce randomly selects which page a visitor sees based on your traffic weighting.  
  

  Note: When a visitor first accesses your page, we deposit a cookie on their machine to track the view and the variant they saw.  As long as that cookie is present when the visitor returns, they will continue to see the same variant.  The same goes for you visiting your own page.