4 Major A/B Testing Mistakes Most Marketers Make

Have you ever considered the feedback of your targeted audience or the likes and dislikes of your targeted audience while designing and developing a landing page?

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Most people don’t even care about understanding the psychology and the behaviors of their targeted audience while designing and developing marketing materials for their campaigns.

They “go with their guts” when designing a landing page or writing content or headlines for a marketing campaign. But things can go horribly wrong if you continue to do so.

The best way to understand what your targeted audience is looking for is to run an AB testing campaign. The idea behind running an AB testing campaign is to create two variants of the same landing pages and then serve these two variants to a different set of people to observe how these visitors react to them. AB testing does help validate your decision, but it needs to be implemented correctly; otherwise, you are staring at a huge loss at the end.

Here are the top 4 AB testing mistakes

that you need to be aware of so that your marketing campaign doesn’t face a disastrous end:

1. Choosing the Wrong Tools

The popularity of AB testing has led to the creation of a barrage of AB testing tools. These half-baked and cheap AB testing tools have flooded the market and are making it really difficult for a marketer to make the right decision. Please don’t take everything at face value because we have noticed that some AB testing software applications are generating fake reports.

Even if they are not fake, reports with dubious metrics can spell disaster for your marketing campaign. If you use these dubious reports to set your marketing campaign’s tone, a disaster is waiting to happen.

Some AB testing software can even overwhelm your website, and sometimes, it can slow down the website. A slow website is as good as nothing. Next time you run an AB testing campaign, you need to check your website’s performance in some other browsers and pcs to ensure that the codes provided by the AB testing tools’ codes are not affecting the overall browsing experience in one way or the other.

Try not to make an upfront payment while selecting an AB testing tool. Rather, ask the company to offer you at least 15 days of trial period so that you can test everything before making the final call.

2. You Don’t Have a Strategy Afterall

Analyzing the result of an AB test is considered the most difficult part of this marketing campaign. But it does not have to be. Most marketers struggle while analyzing the test result because they don’t have a strategy for the first time. They happen to venture into this AB testing bandwagon because everybody else was doing it, so they decided to go ahead with the flow. This is a stupid move, to say the least.

You should not be analyzing the results of the AB test on your intuition alone. Just identifying a drop in the conversion path is not enough; you need to develop a plan to identify the problems and offer resolutions to those problems. Beating around the bushes would not make any difference here. It would help if you had a plan, and there are no two ways about it.

To get a better understanding of the problems, you will have to analyze the data. This can be done by login into your Google Analytics account and figuring out why the visitors are abandoning the conversion funnel in the middle of it. Maybe they are not happy with the shipping cost, or maybe they are apprehensive about the questions you are asking them to complete the purchasing process.

3. You are Just Following Best Practices

Of course, it is a good idea that you are trying to follow the best practices while running an AB testing campaign. But the only problem is that these best practices are not cast in stone, and just because these best practices have worked wonders for thousands of people does not mean that these best practices will also work wonders for your campaign. Moreover, each business has its unique set of requirements and targeted audience, and that means what works best for a business may not work at all for you.

We are not asking you not to follow the best practices. Rather, we are asking to understand the psyche of the targeted audience and then devise a marketing plan that is commensurate with your unique business propositions and budget. Some common tips are reducing the number of fields from the form, eliminating distractive elements from the landing pages, reducing the number of call-to-action buttons, etc.

4. You Don’t Care for Responsive Design

Your website needs to render seamlessly on all devices and browsers, and that means a desktop-only website is not going to cut. Rather you need to invest some money to design and develop a responsive website that works perfectly on all types of devices and screen sizes. Running an AB testing campaign on a desktop-based website could be the worst mistake that a digital marketer can make.

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