How To Use Optimizely Tool For A/B Testing

What is Optimizely?

Optimizely is a user experience optimization platform. In simpler words it is a tool that allows you test and gauge actual user/visitor experiences. You can learn from the derived statistics and work on delivering targeted user experience.

Implementing The Optimizely Snippet Like A Pro

Optimizely can make implementation easy for you. That’s right; you can just take a small snippet of the code, and copy-paste it into your website’s code. This snippet can easily be found in your home page settings. Just find it and copy the line of code that you see or you can email it to your developer and he would add that to your site. For best results you should paste the snippet as high as possible, probably in the tag of the webpage. This page can be the one you’d like to test. To make things simpler, you should add this snippet site-wide.

Testing Your Web Page?

You can create an experiment in six easy steps. The following six steps are very essential and should be used in every experiment:

1. Creating a variation
2. Setting goals
3. Defining URL targeting
4. Creating audiences
5. Setting traffic allocation
6. QA testing your experiment and publishing it

Optimizely Also Allows You To Perform A/B Testing

What Is A/B Testing?

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How A/B Testing with Optimizely Works

In an A/B test with Optimizely, all you have to do is take a webpage or app screen that you want to test and modify the same to create a second version of it. You can include any changes in it and they can be as simple as a single button or a headline or maybe a complete redesign of your app or page. Then, what you do is expose half of your traffic to the original version (which is most commonly known as the control) and the other half gets access to the modified version of the app or page (most commonly called the variation).

The engagement of your visitors and their experience with each version is measured and the data collected is analyzed. This helps you determine whether changing the end user experience resulted in a favorable, negative, or absolutely no change on consumer/visitor behavior.

Rationale for A/B Testing with Optimizely

Optimizely allows for A/B testing which lets individuals, teams, and both big and budding companies alike make changes to the end user experiences. This is done all the while collecting relevant data on the results which further allows the user to construct hypotheses, and understand the impact of the experience that they deliver on user behavior.

Process of A/B Testing

1. Data Collection

Your analytics are the source of all the data and insight that you will need to begin optimizing. It is better to start first with high traffic areas of your app or site page. This allows for faster data gathering and you can easily identify low conversion pages and also high drop-off pages.

2. Identifying Goals

You need to determine whether your original version is more successful than the variation that you created or not. For this your conversion goals will act as the right metrics and help you determine if the variation is more successful than the original version or vice versa.

3. Generating Hypothesis

After goal identification you can start generating A/B testing ideas and hypotheses throwing light upon the reasons for the variation being better than the original version or vice versa.

4. Creating Variations

Using Optimizely to make the desired changes to absolutely any element at all of your website or web page or mobile app will help you alter the end user experience. You can change the color of a button or perhaps swap the order of elements on any page, or even hide those annoying navigation bars or dots.

5. Running the Experiment

Let the experiment begin and then just wait for your audience or visitors to participate. Your visitors will be assigned to either the control or the variation version of your app or/and web page experience. All their activities, behavior and interaction will be measured to determine how each version performs.

6. Analyzing the Results

The final step is to analyze the results. After the completion of the experiment Optimizely presents the data from the experiment conducted to show you a statistically significant difference between the two. From then on it is going to be your call which version to keep and which to discard.