Landing Page Testing 101: How to Conduct Split Testing (A/B Testing) of Your Landing Pages

Digital marketers know for a fact that there are never too many leads, or I should probably say there are never too many high-quality leads. The ever-increasing revenue targets and flat marketing budgets force us to find ways to generate more leads with the same ad spend.

What’s landing page A/B testing?

Landing Page A/B testing is a continuous process of creating multiple versions of the same landing page, pouring an equal amount of traffic on them, and comparing their visitor-to-lead conversion rate against each other.

Why A/B testing your landing pages?

Assuming that your ads are resonating well with your audience and having a fair amount of traffic on your landing page, there are not too many levers that you can pull to boost the number of leads without increasing the spend proportionally. The most common strategy is to start A/B testing (split testing) on your landing pages to identify the landing page design patterns that would get you the boost in the visitor-to-lead conversion rate that you're looking for.

The most common strategy is to start A/B testing (split testing) your landing pages with the goal of identifying the landing page design patterns that would get you the boost in the visitor-to-lead conversion rate that you’re looking for.

What metrics should you be tracking in an A/B test?

Obviously, your ultimate goal is increasing the number of leads (conversions). Therefore, you should be monitoring the visitor-to-lead conversion rate as the crucial metric of any split test. However, there are more things to consider, especially when the landing page conversion rate ends up being almost equal at the end of the test.

• Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate – measures the % of the unique landing page visitors that will fill out the sign-up form or any other target action.
• Average Session Duration – helps you better understand the relevance of your content to your landing page visitors and the perceived content value. The sweet spot here is between 45 seconds and 2 minutes. Anything below 45 seconds – consider adjusting your content, adding more compelling visuals, product explainer videos, etc. Anything above 2 minutes is an overkill for a landing page – consider reorganizing the content and reducing the content on the page.
• Bounce Rate – gives you an additional layer of visibility into how your traffic responds to your landing page. It indicates what part of your audience drops from your page almost immediately after landing on it. If your bounce rate is higher than 15-20%, you should take a closer look at the ads you're running and ensure that your ads' messaging is consistent with the messaging and overall story you're telling on your landing page.

How to launch a landing page A/B test?

When it comes to launching the A/B tests for your landing pages, you've got plenty of options. Some of them are easy; some require a bit more work to get them correctly set up.

1. Using A/B Testing Feature of Your Landing Page Builder is by far the easiest route to the split test nirvana. Advanced landing page creation tools such as Marcom Robot, Unbounce and others have an integrated split testing technology that allows setting up a new A/B test in just a few clicks. All you need to do is to create two versions of a landing page with a drag-and-drop page builder, specify the desired duration of the A/B test, traffic split, and you’re all set.
2. Using Google Analytics is an alternative option that works great for running split tests on the website. As you know, there are a few differences between regular website pages and landing pages, so Google Analytics won’t be able to cover all of your split testing needs. If you’d like to learn more about this topic though, Google has an article about that in their awesome knowledge base.
3. Using Specialized A/B Testing Software is the third option that you’ve got. We actually didn’t know that this market had existed before I started doing some more research in that area. Apparently, there are really powerful products on the market, such as VWO, that help companies run A/B tests for almost anything and compare almost any metric – things like browsing behavior, purchase events, interaction data, sign-ups, etc.

Example: A/B testing your landing pages with PagePro by Marcom Robot

Launching split tests with PagePro landing page builder is an easy 5-step process that requires zero coding. All you have to do is the following:

• Give your A/B test a name
• Select the desired test duration
• Select the desired traffic split percentage
• Specify the URLs for Page A and Page B
• Come up with a unique A/B test URL

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Once your landing page split test has been set up, you'll be able to see the full list of your tests - the ones that are in progress, completed and inactive (not launched yet). For the ones that are in progress or completed, you'll have real-time visibility into the key A/B test metrics.

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