How to A/B Test Landing Pages On Social Media

Remember back in school when you were taught how to properly conduct research on the scientific method?

Well, who would’ve thought that years later, in the industry that you’re currently in, those methods would be relevant in testing your online marketing efforts such as landing pages?

In digital marketing, the term A/B testing is used to determine which specific elements on your standalone page have a better appeal towards your target audience. This makes use of two different variations, the A and the B, which you can test simultaneously to ensure the application of strategic and research-based improvements on your landing pages.

Landing pages and social media

Although it’s important to test one element only at a time, A/B testing opens up the idea of improving your page accordingly for better user experience and design. Certainly, this won’t just make your page’s aesthetic well-enhanced but also boost conversion rates a notch higher.

For instance, many businesses nowadays that penetrate the online universe, also use landing pages to generate leads and gain new customers. With the immense power of social media in reaching people even beyond borders, it’s crucial for marketers to determine whether their landing pages are performing as they should on social platforms.

And since Facebook has tons of online subscribers, it’s a good avenue for revenue acceleration, so A/B testing your landing pages on Facebook and other social networks is quite important.

Here are some essential tips you can consider.

Step 1 – Identify your problem

You cannot thoroughly conduct a research study without first identifying the problem. Some questions you need to ask may be:

• Are my social media followers sharing my landing page?
• Are they converting?
• Which landing page is performing better on social media, and in which aspects?
• Which areas of the landing page do I need to retain or change?

Through asking the right questions and pinpointing precisely where the issue originates you can effectively gather data for testing.

Step 2 – Formulate a hypothesis

A hypothesis is an educated prediction you formulate prior to conducting your experiment. Coming up with a strong and viable hypothesis that’s rooted in solving the issues will be a huge advantage in getting a conclusive result. This can also be beneficial in keeping your research methods on track. In the end, the result should prove or disprove your given prediction.

For instance, you could hypothesize that having two images on your landing page is better than using a short video, or that uploading a short video clip on Facebook encourages customers to click-through to your landing page better than just posting the landing page link.

Step 3 – Determine your sample size

Without statistical confidence, you might just end up having false confidence in the result of your study.

Your needed sample size greatly depends on your targeted outcome, desired sensitivity, and conversion rate, and it should be reasonable enough to come up with a statistically significant difference between the two variations.

There are several reliable sample size calculators available online that you can consider to achieve statistical confidence and avoid making the mistake of lacking measurable results.

Image Source: 12 A/B Split Testing Mistakes I See Businesses Make All The Time

Step 4 – Create your control and variation page

Since you’ll be testing two different versions of your landing page simultaneously, you have to set them up accordingly. The first one is the “control” which is the original copy (landing page A) and the second one is the “variation” (landing page B). The latter integrates the changes that you’ve made, like a different button, headline or theme, or a different set of images.

Here’s an example of a control vs. variation comparison image for White Card Courses, a training company for people in the construction industry. Since they want to see if tweaking the main call-to-action could boost email inquiries, they changed the background color of their CTA, placed their trust badges and put them in plain sight. The control has the original elements while the variation has the updated version.

Image Source: White Card Courses: Case Study on Placing Trust Badges and Tweaking CTA Buttons

As site visitors browse your website, they will be shown either the control or variation. Both are expected to provide a significant difference when it comes to user engagement as you measure, collect and analyze the data through a statistical platform.

Step 5 – Remove outside factors

Just like any other research studies, there are always external factors that contribute to the delay or failure of the A/B test. These can terribly pollute the results of the tests and in the long run, may just drain your wallet. You need to avoid them at all cost.

Step 6 – Run the experiment and analyze

After testing all aspects, you’re all set to run your experiment and drive traffic! The last step is to analyze. Did the results prove or disprove your hypothesis? Which version ruled supreme?

For instance, the Bionic Gloves case study proved their hypothesis right; that the presence of promo code boxes in check-out pages is the reason behind the high rate of cart abandonment, and that doing away with it could result to higher revenue. The effort led to a 24.7% increase in the overall revenue.

In the analysis section, moreover, you can learn many things, like taking away distractions on the check-out page, lessening the number of links or emphasizing your CTAs, which you may use for future reference and improvements.

Whatever the outcome, it’s up to you if you’d make the changes, but at least you unquestionably know the more effective option now.

Conclusion

This is why A/B testing is important. But, doing it on social media will also allow you to get feedback from your followers. You can see their comments, and get real-time updates about how they’re engaging with your landing page.

Thus, you’ll get to know what works better for you to improve landing pages, gain followers, and acquire higher conversion rates through those methods.

Can’t wait for you to try and reap the results!

Guest author: Kimberly Maceda is a Content Writer for ActiveTrail. She writes for some top online marketing sites and blogging advice on email marketing and marketing automation. ActiveTrail is a leading provider of professional-grade email marketing automation software for growing business.

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