Tag: EN

Article

Sep 14, 2018

6min read

Server-Side Testing: Definition, Advantages and Examples

AB Tasty

AB Tasty makes server-side testing available to our clients thought the Feature platform . This opens up a whole new world of testing possibilities – but it also makes us realize that not everyone is 100% familiar with what server-side testing is, when it’s useful, and how it can be fully exploited.

So, here’s a quick recap for those of you who might still be wondering – just what is server-side testing?

Server-side and client-side testing

Before we dive into server-side, let’s get some terminology straight.

If you’re using a website optimization SaaS solution (AB Tasty or similar), you’re already familiar with server-side testing’s counterpart – client-side testing.

Client-side testing simply means website optimization changes are only happening in the visitor’s browser. You don’t necessarily have to have any coding knowledge – in fact, it’s one of our promises at AB Tasty – though sometimes familiarity with HTML, JS, or CSS can be useful.

This is one of the main things to remember about client-side – the web interface is the control room of your tests, and all of the scripts are running on your visitors’ browsers.

However, the relative ease of use of client-side testing – little to no coding needed – also comes with drawbacks. Namely, the scope of your tests remains largely related to design: changing color, wording, layout, hiding or adding elements, etc.

With client-side testing, the scope of your tests remains largely related to design: changing color, wording, layout, hiding or adding elements, etc.

For some companies, this is just fine – and there are countless test ideas you can run client-side – but after a certain point, many want to do more. This is where server-side comes in.

Client-Side	Server-Side
Marketing + Tech	Tech + Marketing
Agility & Reactivity	Advanced Scenarios & Constraints
WYSIWYG + HTML/CSS/JS	In Code / App Implementation
Content, UI and UX	Features & Business Logics
Web Technologies	Platform & Language Agnostic

More sophisticated tests with server-side

In a certain sense, server-side testing cuts out the middleman – the AB Tasty tag used with client-side tests. Instead, using code, developers can go straight to the source and work on the servers that deliver the website to the end user’s browser. Marketers can still set the parameters of a test up in the AB Tasty interface, but all of the implementation takes place at the level of the web server.

Client-side campaigns are defined in the AB Tasty interface. In the above screenshot, you define your variations, your goals and set the traffic allocation, whether dynamic or not.

Because the kind of implementation involved in server-side is more direct, it allows for much more sophisticated tests and website optimization campaigns.

However, the inescapable fact about server-side testing is that whoever is setting up the tests needs to be fluent in back-end coding languages, like PHP, Node.js or Python. If the marketing, digital or e-commerce team is the one running your CRO program, you may already have the appropriate web developer on staff. Others may look to hire a freelancer. However you go about it, if you want to start out with server-side testing, you’ll need both:

Access to the source code of your website
A skilled developer to set up and manage the server-side campaigns

Advantages and limits

Neither way of testing is inherently ‘better’ than the other – both have their place in a website optimization strategy. Instead, it’s more about choosing which is right for your company based on your resources and goals. Very often, you’ll want to use both techniques at once.

Advantages of client-side testing:

Simple and quick to get started – easy ramp-up
No knowledge of coding necessary (marketers don’t need to get the IT team involved)
All testing data stored in easy-to-read SaaS interface

Limits of client-side testing:

Testing scope is ‘cosmetic’ in nature (shape, color, configuration)
Difficult or impossible to involve multiple channels (desktop, mobile web apps, IoT…)

Advantages of server-side testing:

Complex and sophisticated tests possible, including omnichannel

Limits of server-side testing:

Web developer / significant coding skills necessary
Marketers are less autonomous

With AB Tasty, your server-side tests will also benefit from what we offer, client-side: sophisticated reporting, reliable Bayesian statistics, and a dynamic traffic allocation algorithm that means you can optimize every website visit to the max.

Some examples of server-side tests

So, is server-side worth the investment? It depends on your resources, goals and level of maturity, but some of the following examples illustrate just how powerful server-side tests can be:

Find the ‘freemium‘ to ‘premium’ sweet spot

Companies that offer a free version of their product know that, at some point, they need to start charging for their services. The question is, at exactly what point?

This is the issue that AlloVoisins, the French online marketplace for exchanging services among neighbors, was asking themselves. With the help of AB Tasty’s server-side solution, they were able to run a one-month test to determine the optimal number of free ads one could post or accept before being required to switch to the paid version. Finding this sweet spot would allow them to continue offering a free service to entice new customers, without losing out on revenues.

Find the ideal limit for free shipping

Deciding at which basket value an e-commerce site should offer free shipping is a big issue for many companies. A server-side testing approach can help you determine the sweet spot that incentivizes purchases without taking too much off of your bottom line.

Test your search algorithms

Any testing having to do with your search engine or searchandizing solution will need to go through a server-side approach: testing that involves the number of products viewed, the rate at which products are added to the cart, transaction rate, average order value…all need a server-side methodology.

Find the ideal paywall form

If you’re an online media outlet, paywalls are probably part of your website.

Though it is possible to put in place a paywall client-side, people can easily get around them by deleting their cookies or browsing history. For a 100% trustworthy solution, the trigger rules should be managed server-side. This way, you can securely test the impact of different kinds of paywall configurations on your subscription rate.

I want to learn more about server-side testing with AB Tasty!

Interested in learning more about server-side testing? Check out our ebook on 10 tests you can only run server-side.

Ready to take the next step? Contact your dedicated Key Account Manager or write an email to Contact@abtasty.com to learn more.

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Jul 14, 2018

5min read

15 Ways to Drastically Improve Your B2B Conversion Rates

AB Tasty

Selling to a business isn’t drastically different from selling to a consumer. They’re both people after all.

The big difference is that businesses may have more than one decision maker, are likely more savvy in regards to how they spend business money, and won’t be sucked into weak offers as easily.

If you’re looking to increase your B2B conversions, here’s a list of things that will help you out. check out our ultimate guide to conversion rate optimization for more best practices.

Rework Your Offer

Take a hard look at your offer. See if there’s anything you can do to sweeten the deal. You can also look at how you position the offer. Are you highlighting the best parts of the deal? Is there anything more you can do? Don’t be afraid to change pricing, incentives or product amounts to achieve better conversion. A small decrease in product price can actually lead to more overall profit.

Talk About Benefits, Not Features

Too often we list the features of a product or service instead of how it will benefit us. The features aren’t the real selling point; it’s how it will benefit the business. A feature is “fast service”. The benefit of the speed is “you’ll have more time to focus on sales”. Use the benefits to gain more traction.

Target High-Quality Leads

Casting a wide net could be costing you more than it actually helps. Whatever methods you’re currently using to attract leads, ensure that it’s targeting the right people. Your conversion rate can jump just by funneling more high quality leads in, and not changing anything else. If you haven’t analyzed your target market in a while, take another look. See if you can be more efficient.

Retarget Your Audience

There’s always the temptation to throw as much money at as many leads as possible, but your best chance at a conversion may be someone who’s already traveled down the sales funnel a bit. Retargeting ads can help keep you top of mind, and give your landing page a second life.

Watch The Competition

See what your competitors are doing. Keeping a close eye on them might give you some insight into changing a couple things to help conversions. Pay close attention to how they walk you down the sales funnel, any pricing, landing page copy, and marketing efforts. Following them on social media and signing up for the newsletter will keep you in the loop.

Have Credibility

Trust is a hard thing to achieve with strangers. Try adding some credibility to your page with testimonials, listing other clients that use your product or service, and consider offering some money back or satisfaction guarantees. A little trust goes a long way.

Use Email and Automation

Put technology to work for you. By using email and automated marketing, you can work leads down the funnel without having to track them yourself. Email out exclusive offers, nudge them to finish the transaction, sweeten the deal, or just remind them you exist. Email is a powerful tool that you don’t have to spend a lot of time on once it’s set up.

Personalize The Content

Dynamic content is easier than ever. If you know where they came from, tailor the content to that audience. You can dynamically change location information, personalize name information or add their business into the landing page. The possibilities are endless. Personalization can go a long way to finalizing the transaction.

Make Your CTA’s Obvious

Far too often the call to action is hidden, too far down, or not clear enough. Try moving your call to action higher up on the page for more clicks. Is it visible? How big is it? It is clear what you want the user to do? You can also try different language in the CTA to increase conversions.

Test Everything

Marketing messages, call to action buttons, emails, landing page copy – test it all. Maybe not all at once, but over time do split testing and try new things. Language, visuals, and offers can make a difference in response. Testing will allow you to find out what works the best in all cases, and bring it together.

Don’t Trick People with Ads

If your ad promises something your landing page doesn’t deliver, you just wasted your time. Getting a click on an ad isn’t not nearly as important as getting a relevant click on an ad. If you want to increase conversions, you need to make sure your advertising isn’t tricking people into visiting your site. Only solicit qualified leads.

Target Pain Points

Every business has pain points. You just need to locate them. Is it cash flow? Staffing? Find the pain points that you’re able to solve, and push those buttons. If you can solve a pain point, you’ll have a sale.

Make Your Offer Easy to Read

Don’t confuse things. Keep them easy to understand and read. If you can’t do it, find someone good at content writing. Your offer needs to be easily understandable. Your landing page should be something the business owner can skim. They don’t need every little detail in order to make a decision, and if you waste their time with a hard to read page, they’ll leave before you even get to your pitch.

Simplify The Experience

What can you cut out of your sales funnel? What can you cut out of your landing page? How much are you asking the potential buyer to do before they count as a conversion? The more forms and fields you ask them to fill out, the more your conversions will drop. Cut out anything you can, and make the process as simple as possible.

Answer All Objections

Try to think up all of the major reasons the business owner could object to making the conversion. Once you have them, crush them. If you can remove all objections, you’ve pushed some pretty big obstacles out of the way. The path to converting them just became a whole lot easier.

The best way to increase conversions is to constantly be trying new ways to attract potential clients, new ways of talking to them, and new ways to close the deal. Try a few of the points above and see if you can increase your B2B conversions. Small changes can make a big difference.

About the author: Kerry Creaswood is a young and ambitious writer from Savannah, GA. She is interested in self-development, design and marketing. To find more about Kerry – check her Twitter

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Jul 3, 2018

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7 Tips for Implementing A/B Testing in your Social Media Campaigns

AB Tasty

A/B testing has been around for decades, even before the advent of the internet or social media. In fact, it actually spans back to the time when James Lind first conducted an A/B test in a clinical trial over 300 years ago.

Many years later, Google famously used an A/B test to decide which shade of blue to use in its campaigns, showing each shade to 1% of their users. Some time in between James Lind and Google, marketers would run tests on TV or newspaper ads. They would then assess the results and make changes accordingly, and then conduct more tests, and so forth. These tests started weeks – or even months – before the campaign launch, making for a time-consuming and tedious process.

Fortunately, testing is an easier process nowadays, and marketers are able to test virtually all elements of a campaign. More specifically, A/B testing has found a special importance in social media. Digital marketers introduce two slightly different posts, testing various elements to see which one gets a better response.

Although testing has become easier, it has certainly become more complex as well. The issue that many marketers now face is knowing where and how to introduce testing in their social media campaigns. To help, we’ve compiled a list of the elements of a social campaign that you should be testing, and how you can start executing these tests right away.

1. Find Your Target Audience

Before you start a campaign, you have to get to know your target audience. This process for testing is unique, in that you won’t be changing the actual contents of the campaign. Instead, you will show the same advertisement or post to various segments to see which one will react best.

For instance, when testing Facebook ads, you will generally want to segment by location, age, gender, device, platform, or interests.

2. Experiment with Hashtags

While using too many hashtags might annoy your audience, just the right amount could get your post more attention. Having said that, you should avoid simply testing a post with hashtags versus a post without hashtags. Companies tend to test posts with multiple hashtags against those with just one, posts with different hashtags, as well as hashtag placement within the post.

3. Test Various Ad Formats

When using social media advertising, you should definitely be testing different ad formats. Specifically, in the case of Facebook, some formats will work best for certain types of posts. Edith McClung, a Digital Marketer at Academized, gives a great example: “While a carousel ad might work for a product launch – viewers will be able to see multiple pictures of your product – an advertisement with ‘Get Directions’ might work better with a restaurant launch”. Keep in mind that different advertisement types will have varied results based on your target audience and the content you are promoting.

4. Change Up the Post Text

This is perhaps the most common practice when it comes to social media split testing, as there are various elements of your post text might affect your success differently.

Here are some things that you could test:

Length of the post
Style
Use of emoji
Tone of voice
Use of numbers and lists

Remember, you always want to always proofread your posts. Even though we live in the age of texting and abbreviations, readers still expect your posts to be flawless. Even the smallest mistakes can be off-putting to the reader. Using tools such as AcademAdvisor or Via Writing can help.

5. Use Different Images and Videos

While it’s generally the case that social media users prefer posts that feature images and videos, it’s still important to test this on your own audience for each specific platform. For example, split testing often shows that Twitter users prefer GIFs to regular images, so companies present on this social media platform tend to use GIFS more often than other types of graphics.

The testing possibilities are endless, as you can try posts with no images or videos versus text with images and videos, posts with gifs versus posts with images, the length of the video in posts, etc.

Just be sure to balance informative text out with visual content and use an appealing format. Tools like like Boom Essays or Essay Roo can help.

6. Play Around With Your CTAs

Your Call-To-Action is another crucial, yet often overlooked component to your post. Users have varied responses to different CTAs, and you need to find the one that will work best for your audience. Test several CTAs in your posts and use the one that is most relevant yet also gets you the most clicks.

7. Try Out Different Headlines

Headlines are one of the most important aspects to your posts, as they are often the most prominent component. Test the same factors that you normally would in post content – length of the headline, use of numbers, style, etc. If writing headlines aren’t your strength, it might be a good idea to use a guide – websites like StateOfWriting or UK Writings can help you.

Wrapping Up

Split testing is one of the best methods out there for getting things right on social media. The same post can get a different response based on the title, CTA, advertisement type, etc. By continuing to test, you will be able to optimize your social media strategy by finding what works best with your audience.

In this day and age, it has become so apparent how much social media can impact the success of a business or brand, and by adding A/B testing to your repertoire, you could be seeing even more of a benefit from platforms that you are already using. So get creative, have fun with it, and watch your business grow.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Freddie Tubbs is a digital marketing strategist at Paper Fellows. He regularly takes part in online marketing conferences and contributes expert articles to the Vault, Australian Help and Big Assignments blogs.

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Jun 29, 2018

11min read

How Creating Personas Can Help You Personalize Your Website

Anthony Brebion

Personas are one of the most important marketing tools a business has in the current age. It is broad enough that it does not require huge resources to implement in the way personalization does, yet specific enough to inform design teams and capture the attention and loyalty of customers. It requires creative thinking, hard data and a tacit understanding of customers traits, requirements and expectations.

What Is Persona

A customer persona is a broad, fictional character that a business creates from data related to their customer’s needs, wants, traits and goals. While a persona is not an actual person, it is based on real-world characteristics of a business’s customer base and can also include potential customers, depending on the research carried out.

Personas essentially narrow the parameters and refine the focus of business practices to suit the specific, yet broad needs of their customers. They do this by creating main groups that represent the major users of a website and what their needs are.

Persona Vs Cognitive Styles

There is some confusion between the definition of a cognitive style and that of a persona. This is further confused by the fact that few definitions of cognitive style are agreed upon and that there is some crossover between the concept and that of personas.

As previously described, personas are broad, fictitious characters that help define the parameters of certain aspects of a business and its targeted audience or customer base. Cognitive styles, on the other hand, is a thinking style, a personality trait if you will, that describes the way an individual might perceive specific information. As such, it is a lot more complex and individual. Unlike personas, cognitive styles are hard-wired and therefore unchanging. In practice, a persona has little to do with cognitive style, but cognitive styles can inform the creation of a persona, alongside other data.

Benefits Of Creating Personas

Creating personas has many benefits, providing the correct level of research has been carried out. In some ways, customer personas are a method of simplification.

Once a business understands the broad needs and expectations of its customers, it can act accordingly. This narrowing of the parameters can focus attention in the right areas with specified ideas.

For example, the design of a website, from its wireframe to even the color scheme, can be refined with the right type of data to hand, informing the entire design team of what is required. Meanwhile, new ideas can be refined and focused with customer needs in mind, rather than the hit or miss, typically miss, of implementing ideas on hunches and whims.

Types Of Personas

Customer personas are typically divided into types and are highly dependent on the goals of the business creating them. While there is a lot of crossover, not to mention debate, four of the most commonly defined types are:

Goal Personas
Role Personas
Engaging Personas
Fictional Personas

Goal Personas

One of the simplest, yet most important, is the goal-oriented persona. This is essentially predicting what the customer is looking for from a product or service. The goal-oriented persona is one that has already been defined to some degree, based on data. Goal-based personas are created in three ways. The persona itself (the type of person defined by the group), the scenario (which essentially describes the narrative of the interaction- where, how and why) and the goal itself, which is the persona’s motivation and needs.

Role Personas

One of the most data dependent of the four roles is the role persona. There is a lot of crossover with the goal persona in that it is highly behavioral, but it looks at it from a different perspective. In some ways, the role-based persona is a more empathetic perspective as it looks at the user’s role, rather than wants and issues they may face. For example, what does the persona’s role require? Exactly how will the product be used and in what environment? What are the pressures and requirement of the persona’s role in the day to day running of the business? This persona requires both qualitative and quantitative data, and as such it might need to be highly specific. In this sense, it can spill over into personalization, more on that later.

Engaging Personas

One of the pitfalls of creating personas is the tendency to drift into a stereotype. A stereotype is the practice of assumption, putting people, even groups, into neat boxes based on previously held ideas and not data, the exact opposite of personas. Engaging personas are, broadly speaking, a mix of the role and goal-based personas and are used by designers to fill out the persona to form a rounded character. The most empathetic of the types, engaging personas are created by describing the feelings and backgrounds while creating stories that help designers formulate ideas that engage customers on a more profound level.

Fictional Personas

While all personas are fictional in the sense that they are characters created that represent major groups, they are based on hard data. Fictional personas, instead, are those created by UX design and are based on their experience with customers. Fictional personas are always assumed to be flawed on a fundamental level due to the amount of assumption involved in their creation, but by engaging the design team in the decision process, some wisdom can be attained that would be unlikely to show up in the data.

How To Create Personas?

It is one thing understanding how personas work, but quite another understanding of how to create personas. As with anything that appears complex at the start, taking it step-by-step is key.

Where To Start?

Customer Personas should be created at the very beginning of a project. This does require some planning, but like the much-used analogy of house building, the foundations should be the first thing that is built, not the roof.

As is generally the case with planning at the start of a project, defining the goals is important. This, in turn, will define what type and how many personas will be required. Each project is unique, but the one hard and fast rule regarding personas is sticking to the major audience groups for the site. It should also be remembered that personas are not individuals, rather they are fictionally created individuals that represent these major groups.

From here on it is all about research. Find out:

What are your customers’ behaviors?
Who are they?
Why are they using your website?
What are their expectations?

What Does A Customer Persona Consist Of?

Each customer persona consists of various traits, what these are will depend to some degree on the business, the goals of the project and the purpose of the website. There are, however, some tried and tested elements that remain ubiquitous when creating personas.

Firstly, there is the persona group, which can include the job role, as described earlier. This will include responsibilities and issues the person might face in their day to day life. Another important factor will be demographics. This includes age, ethnicity, gender, identity and marital status. Goals are a mainstay in persona creation as they refine the previously mentioned inherent and status-based traits and personalize them further, allowing you to create a more accurate persona. Lastly, the environment can be a large factor, particularly if the service is international.

Best Practices When Creating Buyer Personas

Although each project might be different, there are some best practices that are relevant for just about every project. To begin with, while personas are fictional, making them as real as possible, and therefore as relatable as possible, means that it will help the design team create and relate to the persona they are producing the website for.

Typically, it is best practice to create three to five personas per project (occasionally up to seven) as this number provides the range of traits that is required to truly represent actual and potential customers.

One of the most common mistakes when it comes to creating personas is to drift into stereotyping. This is understandable to some degree as it is an attempt to deal with general traits rather than individual ones. As previously mentioned, stereotypes are assumptions, unthinking and informed by bias, both implicit and explicit. Generalizations, however, are not explicitly stereotypes, and in the case of personas, are informed by hard data.

Examples

Each persona should be given a name to which they are referred to. You can also add a generic profile picture that represents the persona in a broad sense.

The persona should be rounded and believable, but that does not mean they need to be complex psychological profiles. Personas range from rather broad to highly detailed, but they should never be beyond the understanding of your team or your customer’s comprehension. It is therefore best to avoid being too personal.

User persona

Note the use of a profile picture to engender an empathy with the character.

Buyer persona example

The detailed purchasing behavior section helps Ecommerce professionals create concise but detailed information to inform on a more profound level.

Buyer persona example for retail

Personas can help a business relate to groups that are not necessarily their own. In this way, a business can be informed about Millennial customers, whether or not they are of the same generation.

How To Use Personas

After creating buyer personas, the next step is to implement them. This involves avoiding some pitfalls that can derail the entire project, or at least make the endeavor a waste of time and resources.

The first obstacle often occurs before the project has gotten going. For some, there is an inherent mistrust of personas, typically by stakeholders or management who believe that humans cannot be defined by the broad strokes that are part of the practice of creating personas. This in itself is a misunderstanding: personas are not meant to appear as individual, like with personalization techniques, but are instead helpful parameters within which ideas can be focused. One way in which this can be avoided is by showing the vast amount of data that goes into creating each persona and the thought processes that create them.

Fundamentally misunderstanding what a persona is and how it should be implemented is particularly toxic when it comes to the UX design team. One of the worst practices when implementing personas is attempting to use a previously successful persona wholesale for a new project. This is the equivalent of forcing a square peg into a round hole, it simply won’t work. Personas may be broad and representative, but they are also unique.

Personas In Web Personalization

As previously mentioned, personas are not personalization. Although there is some crossover between the two, and their goals are similar, when looking at the detail of the nitty gritty, it is clear the two are opposites of sorts. That being said, personas can be a hugely helpful first step in understanding the complex world of personalization, and, more importantly, a first step in its direction.

How Can Personas Be Used In Personalization?

Because personalization is a multi-levelled concept to implement, starting along the road to its full implementation is often a productive way to start. Personas are a great way to do this as they specify the practice without getting into the complex details inherent in personalization, such as minute data, privacy rules and content.

It would be helpful at this point to note the differences between personas and segmentation. Personalization audience segmentation is another step on the ladder towards personalization. It is more specific then a persona, and therefore more complex and granular in its use of data. For example, a persona might describe certain traits and needs of a group (wants information on vegan food products) while segmentation will divide this group further (wants information on organic or gluten free vegan products).

The Persona’s Life Cycle

Customer personas are not the scaffolding of the house, they are the decoration, and as such, they need to change with the times. Many things can affect a persona’s life cycle, changes in technology, fashion, economics and demographics can all require changes in the persona profiles. Therefore, it is essential to stay on top of any changes that might be required.

The Persona Based Concept Of Service Mass Customization

Mass customization has grown enormously in recent years, offering customers the chance to modify products to suit their needs and tastes, and is particularly popular within the fashion retail sector. However, it is growing as a concept as more and more people seek to “Personalize” as an expression of individuality.

Personas are one of the main tools for creating mass customization platforms as they are specific enough to inform, yet broad enough to maintain a sense of individuality. Personas can be created to narrow the parameters of a mass customization platform to make it manageable for the manufacturer, while still providing the choice that customers crave in 2018.

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Jun 27, 2018

6min read

How Does Page Speed Really Affect your Conversions

Anthony Brebion

Can one single factor such as page speed make a big difference when it comes to conversions?

More than you’d have expected.

In fact, according to research led by Akamai, a two-second delay in page load time can increase bounce rate by more than 100%.

That’s right, your bounce rate can actually double, meaning you could be losing an enormous amount of visitors, right from the start.

How slow website load time can impact your conversions — This could be your website.

As if it wasn’t enough, research led by the same source pointed out that more than 40% of visitors who had a bad experience with a website’s performance would tell a friend or a family member.

In short, slow loading time doesn’t only affect your incoming visitors, it also potentially deters future visitors from shopping on your website.

The main problem that marketers face with loading time is that most of them can’t actually grasp the importance of improving page speed by a few milliseconds: it’s just not tangible enough.

In consequence, most online retailers often overlook page loading time in their annual priorities because they focus on other more “tangible” enhancements such as design, SEO, social media, paid ads…

And that’s a mistake. Research and data from industry giants and experts have all shown that page loading time directly affects conversions, page views, CPC, SEO, and direct revenues.

To help you sort it out and quantify the impact of page loading time over conversions, we prepared some additional insights that should help you better understand the stakes involved in improving page speed.

Keep reading, it’s worth it.

Page load time impacts users experience

Did we mention that online shoppers hate long loading time?

If not, here’s an interesting fact: according to stress-testing specialist Dotcom-Monitor, “75% of all users will typically bounce as page load time passes the 3-second mark.”

Aside from bounce rates, page speed also matters when it comes to satisfying your customers: Aberdeen points out that an extra second in loading time results in a staggering 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. That is just ridiculous.

Knowing this, adding just a few extra seconds to your loading time yields unbelievably negative results on your ability to engage your visitors and commit to good customer service while around 45% of all online shoppers expect a website to load within 2 seconds.

If page speed does affect how customers interact with your website: it also has a direct impact on their likeliness to purchase.

How website speed directly affects your sales

If your site is plagued with speed issues, there’s no doubt you’re losing tons and tons of potential customers on your website and thus many sales.

Adding to that point, let’s not forget what we said about dissatisfied customers: 40% of them won’t hesitate to talk poorly about their online shopping experiences.

About those same dissatisfied customers, HubSpot mentions that 80% of them are less likely to buy again from the same website: that is a huge loss in potential returning visitors.

And ecommerce players need returning visitors: it’s a key element of the Customer Lifetime Value as they represent up to 48% of all transactions according to Business Insider.

To quantify how important page speed is regarding conversions, Walmart came up with an impressive analysis regarding their online sales and how customers behaved in comparison to page loading times.

Here’s the main takeaway: they noticed a “sharp decline in conversion rate as average site load time increases from 1 to 4 seconds.”

While their conversion rates remain stable between 5 and 8 seconds loading times; notice how big of a difference it makes for users that experienced loading times under 3.5 seconds.

Of course, not all websites can match Walmart’s volume of sales and that’s totally fine.

There are still big financial benefits to draw from page speed improvements; regardless of your revenues.

Your mobile website speed influences your online visibility (SEO)

Breaking news in the small world of SEO: mobile page speed will effectively become an official ranking factor in search results, starting July 2018 (source: Search Engine Land).

Because more than 50% of all worldwide traffic was generated through mobile phones in 2024, it’s easy to grasp how important mobile page loading times are becoming for all online businesses.

Well aware of the meteoric rise of mobile traffic, Google rolled out its Mobile-First Index in 2017, meaning that the search engine now ranks websites primarily based on mobile performance factors rather than desktop performances.

Mobile page speed now directly affects SEO game — Source: Moz

Simply put, this means that your mobile page speed now directly affects your SEO game: it could potentially hurt your rankings in the next months.

Additional resources: Mobile Optimization Guide

What’s an ideal website load time?

When it comes to reaching a perfect loading time, Google says that 53% of mobile visitors leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load: this is what you should aim for.

Behind the curtain, the ugly truth is rather alarming: Google points out that the average time it takes for a mobile landing page to fully load is in the 20 seconds range: millions of websites are miles away from the ideal loading time.

3 free tools to measure your website page speed

If you’ve kept reading with us to this point, you’ll probably want a quick overview of your website speed and that’s totally fine.

To help you find out the stumbling blocks that curb your website’s loading speed, here are 3 free tools that will help you improve your page speed:

These 3 tools are free and user-friendly: just put in your URL and you’re good for a quick analysis.

If you’re looking for further page speed insights, take a look at Google’s PageSpeed Rules so that you can take action now.

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Jun 26, 2018

7min read

How to Effectively A/B Test your Content Headlines

Anthony Brebion

Breaking news: according to CopyBlogger, 80% of all readers never make it past the headline.

If you read this, you’re among our happy 20% and you shall not be disappointed.

The truth is: it’s a pretty serious issue for all publishers.

Similarly, the Washington Post reported that 6 in 10 Americans acknowledge that they don’t read past the headlines regarding any type of news.

So, should we just stop writing?

Obviously not.

In 2018, the written content is still one of the most consumed media (in competition with videos) and remains a powerful tool to:

Build brand awareness
Generate B2B Leads
Report news
Drive sales
Grow your audience
Rank on search engines

Knowing that most readers won’t spend more than 15 seconds reading an average article (source: Buffer), crafting powerful and catchy headlines has never been more important to ensure that your audience will stick around for a while and that you don’t produce content in vain.

But how do you make sure that your headlines really work?

It’s simple: you need to run some headline A/B testing.

What is headline testing?

Definition: headline testing consists of creating several title variations for the same article (or online media piece) in order to find out which one performs the best.

Based on your objectives, headline testing can be used to track several metrics such as:

Number of shares
Average Reading Time
Click-Through-Rate
Bounce Rate
Conversions

How to conduct headline testing

Headline testing requires you to define a title as the “control version” in order to compare it with one or more variant.

While choosing the number of variants, bear in mind that the more variants you wish to test, the larger sample you will need in order to obtain statistically relevant results.

Once you’ve chosen your variants, you will use an A/B testing tool to run your tests and see which headline outperforms the others.

Typically, an A/B testing tool will send a percentage of your page’s traffic to each variant until it identifies a winner.

From there, the tool will allocate 100% of the traffic to the “winner” in order to maximize your page’s performance.

Sound good?

Let’s see how to come up with brilliant headline ideas that you will be able to A/B test later on.

How to brainstorm headline ideas

Headlines come in many forms depending on whether you’re writing an article, a landing page or even a product description.

Given this variety of headlines, we’ll try to help you craft various headlines through general guidelines to meet your business objectives.

Catchy content headline to test — Source: EveryDayBright

Include real data and numbers

Numbers act like candies for the brain: we just love to see them because they give us facts and figures to work on.

Overall Headline Preferences — Source: Conductor

In 2013, Conductor came up with a study that showed the impact of adding numbers to your headlines: it appears that readers do prefer headlines that include numbers.

Craft a strong value proposition

Creating a value proposition for your readers means that you need to work on including a real benefit inside your headline.

Working on your value proposition is the cornerstone of every headline creation process: it helps you address your core audience while promising something in exchange for their attention.

Depending on the content you’re working on, crafting your value proposition is a process that basically sells your content: it will determine whether or not your potential readers will click on your content.

Here are some formulations commonly used to craft a strong value proposition:

Recipes for success
Expert opinions
Special offers and discounts
Tips and advice
Guides, ebooks
Facts, studies
Ideas, strategies

Trigger your readers’ curiosity

Capturing your readers’ attention is no easy task given the average level of online competition that most publishers encounter.

Raise curiosity with your content headline — Source: SmartBlogger

In order to grab your visitors’ attention from the beginning, try to avoid headlines that can easily be answered by “Yes” or “No”.

“Yes and No” headlines are dangerous because they force your visitors to form an opinion about your question or your statement; which will eventually lead to a significant share of visitors choosing not to click.

Here’s a list of formulations used to trigger curiosity:

“How to …”
“The 7 facts you didn’t know about …”
“How [insert_name] managed to [action] in [days]”
“The Complete Guide to …”
“What every [target] should know about [subject]”

Watch your competition

There’s no secret for marketing success: practice makes perfect.

Because most businesses typically have dozens of competitors, you should pay attention to your competitors’ headline formulations.

From there, try to identify general trends and success formulas that you could apply to your own content.

Watch headlines used by your competitors

Ideas for effective headlines from the competition can be found in:

Newsletters
Websites pages and landing pages
Product descriptions
Ebooks
SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)

Keep them simple and clear

Online visitors and shoppers are over-exposed to marketing messages all day long.

Knowing this, it can be clever to keep your headlines short, simple and clear in order to deliver straightforward information to your potential readers.

Because marketers are always searching for new magic formulas, they sometimes come up with complex, tricky formulations that you should avoid.

Use a headline analyzer

Headlines analyzers are online tools that score your headlines based on a certain number of parameters.

Typically, these tools will grade your headlines on a 100 scale in order to help you craft catchier, better headlines.

They often measure the length and analyze your headline’s structure to determine optimal word order, keyword use, and formulation.

Here are 2 free tools you can use to analyze your headlines:

https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer — Source: CoSchedule

We’ve analyzed our own headline to see what type of results we would get.

Key Takeaway: our headline “How to Effectively A/B Test your Content Headlines” scored a reassuring 72/100 because it contains a power word “effectively” and an emotional element that triggers curiosity “How to…”.

The tool even identified our main keywords, which is a good starter for search engine optimization.

Run A/B tests and compare results

Impact of Headline Testing on Pageviews. Source: Priceonomics.com

As you know, headline testing can bring tremendous benefits to your key metrics such as page views, CTR and conversions.

To prove this point, Priceonomics came with an analysis that showed a 33% improvement on pageviews following headline testing: a major improvement that could drastically improve the way visitors behave on your website.

Now that you’ve come across our best practices for headline creation, it’s high time you start testing your own headlines variations to find out the most effective ones.

In order to do so, here’s a little checklist you can follow:

Use our A/B Testing tool to set up your experimental environment
Our WYSIWYG editor makes it easy to test headlines
Start brainstorming headline ideas and formulate hypotheses
Try to run some headline ideas through CoSchedule to measure your chances of success.
Run your tests and collect results
Measure your tests results and track important KPIs to monitor any change

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Jun 25, 2018

11min read

A Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing your Emails

Anthony Brebion

Email marketing is all about maximizing your open, click and response rates while generating as many leads and sales as possible for a given email campaign.

However, in our era of over-saturated email boxes, chances are your prospects won’t actually open your emails as they receive so many.

On average, MailChimp estimates that open rates vary from 18% to 28% depending on the industry concerned. While it’s not catastrophic, it still means that 75% to 80% of your emails will remain… unopened.

Let’s be honest: there is not a single magic formula to craft the perfect email. Otherwise, it would have largely spread over the internet and become overused in a matter of weeks.

The truth is, no one can really guess the perfect email campaign for your company – it will depend on a myriad of factors that we will cover later in this article.

As a consequence, the only way to design and write the most effective emails is to A/B test them.

Not just once, but many times.

By doing so, you’ll vastly increase your chances of uncovering magic tricks that will effectively increase your open, click-through and response rates.

Using email A/B testing, you’ll also discover what actually works on your prospects and how to address them.

Without further ado, let’s begin this guide by answering one simple question:

Why does email A/B testing matter?

Despite being one of the oldest online marketing channels, email marketing remains one of the top performing solutions to reach a broad audience and convert prospects into leads or clients.

More importantly, emailing is a marketing channel that is both:

Highly profitable
Often affordable

Return on investment of email compared to other channels — Sources: Neil Patel & EmailMarketingGold

As you can see, email marketing returns an average of $40 for every dollar spent, which is a massive improvement compared to display campaigns or banner ads for instance.

Knowing that email marketing is profitable, let’s see how email A/B testing will truly help your business:

It will improve your open and click-through rates

After a few A/B tests, your company should start to identify trends and common factors that lead to higher open and click-through rates.

This means that you will get more views but also more clicks to your website or online forms, which leads us to our second point.

It will increase conversions and generate revenues

Using a marketing automation software, you will be able to analyze your funnel and traffic sources, which is crucial to identifying how many opened emails actually resulted in leads or sales.

Knowing that, you will get a precise estimation of your email marketing ROI, which is a good start to further increase conversions and revenues.

From there, it’s up to you to conduct additional tests on your email campaigns in order to generate more revenues.

You will know what works for your audience

As we said in our introduction, not all industries are identical when it comes to email statistics.

Meanwhile, your prospects most likely have special needs and questions that need to be addressed in a specific way – which most marketers won’t be able to do on the first try.

After you’ve conducted a few conclusive tests, you’ll soon discover major differentiating factors that will account for your future email marketing campaigns success.

Using A/B tests, you’ll be able to craft tailor-made emails that will fit your prospects and generate more engagement.

You will save time and money

Although email marketing isn’t the most expensive online channel, it does cost a significant amount of money to send emails to a large audience and create adapted visuals, landing pages and forms.

Using email A/B tests, you’ll save time and money by quickly identifying the recipe for success in your given industry and by implementing incremental changes that will lead to better results.

What elements should I A/B test first in my emails?

At this point, you’re probably wondering how to set up a proper email A/B test and start gaining insights on what works and what doesn’t.

In order to help you do so, we’ve prepared a list of the 8 most important elements that could lead to significant improvements for your email campaigns.

Ready?

Subject & Preheader

A/B test email subject & preheader

Subjects lines and preheaders form the only touch point before an email is opened.

Therefore, they’re highly valuable items that require extensive attention despite their size.

Remember: your headlines and preheaders will determine whether or not your emails will be opened.

On average, optimal length for email subject lines is around 60-70 characters, no more.

You could try to tweak several parameters for your subject lines, including:

Word order (try reversing the order)
Tone (neutral, friendly, provocative)
Length (try shorter, try longer)
Personalization (try including their first name)

When it comes to preheaders, they’re usually pulled from the first line of your email. But as your email marketing senses sharpen, you could try to create intentional preheaders that most emailing tools now support.

If you can create your own preheaders, try to write complementary information and add relevant words that could trigger your prospects’ curiosity.

Different days and hours

For various reasons, email campaigns don’t perform the same depending on when you send them.

For starters, you could try to send emails on different days of the week: GetResponse reports that Tuesdays get the best open rates compared to the rest of the week, although the gap is relatively small (19.9% for Tuesdays compared to 16.9 on Saturdays).

Because studies can be biased and cultural differences can change this data, it’s important that you try different days in order to find what works best for your company.

Likewise, there are studies like MailChimp’s and HubSpot’s that tend to show a particular trend for optimal sending time around 10am to 11am.

Optimal sending time for your email campaigns — Source: MailChimp

Knowing this, you could try to adjust your campaign around different hours of the day just to see if one performs better than the others.

Length

The length of your email’s body can have a significant impact on your readers’ behavior, depending on what they have been used to.

With several studies all reporting serious decreases in our attention span, it may be worth deleting one or two paragraphs just to see if your email performs better.

One general piece of advice is to be straightforward and cut out the unnecessary, overused commercial taglines.

Of course, your emails’ ideal body length will mostly depend on your prospects’ expectations and your industry’s emailing practices.

In the fashion industry, the trend is moving towards flashy, punchy visuals with minimal copy that often features a very basic call-to-action.

On the contrary, B2B emails can purposely be long and feature bullet lists as well as multiple call-to-actions.

Visuals

Since our brain just loves visuals (read full study here), adding engaging visuals to your emails can be a very powerful tool to generate more engagement from your readers.

Similarly to body length, visuals won’t show the same efficiency in all industries.

In fact, adding too many visuals can distract readers from the core message which often leads to having your call-to-actions ignored.

If you want to get a clear idea on whether or not images are adapted to your email marketing efforts, just try to run a Version A with no visuals (but the same subject line, body and CTAs) versus a Version B that contains visuals: you’ll see which one performs better.

Getting more personal

Adopting a friendlier, more casual tone and copy can often transform the way your readers perceive your email activities.

Using most recent emailing tools, you can dynamically add first and last names inside your emails: this will create a sense of personalization that most people like.

The copy

While there is no secret recipe to writing perfect copy (because it depends on your objectives), try running different versions through A/B tests while only changing the copy: this could lead to tremendous changes for your conversion rate.

If you’ve formulated different hypotheses about your readers’ expectations, create two different copies based on anticipated behaviors and send them to the same mailing list to see which one outperforms the other.

Call-to-actions & buttons

Whether they’re hypertext, images or buttons, your CTAs’ design and copy can have serious consequences on your readers’ likeliness to click them.

If you want to conduct in-depth CTAs A/B testing, try to compare different colors and formats to see if one stands out from the rest.

If that doesn’t deliver statistically significant results, you could try to change your value proposition; i.e the offer behind your call-to-action.

The best practices for email A/B testing

Now that we covered the main elements that can be tested through email A/B testing, let’s have a quick look at the 4 best practices to bear in mind before running email A/B tests.

Having a goal in mind

Defining objectives prior to running any A/B tests is a massive time-saver for any marketer.

In fact, it’s highly important that we as marketers formulate hypotheses based on the data we exploit.

You need to increase the open rate: In this case, you should mainly focus on your subject lines and preheaders: these are the two main elements that will affect this metric.
You need to increase your click-through-rate, downloads or subscriptions: If you want to increase engagement, then test all body-related content such as the copy, the tone, the visuals and the call-to-actions as they may all trigger an increase in clicks, subscriptions or purchases.

One vs Multiple Variables Testing

When it comes to A/B testing, adding multiple variables in your tests means that you will need an ever-increasing sample size in order to get statistically relevant results.

Besides, comparing two versions with multiple variants each will make it difficult for you to get relevant results as you won’t know which element triggered an increase or a decrease for your key metric.

If you have a small sample size, our general advice is to test one variable at a time.

However, there are cases where you will want to A/B test two completely different versions of your email: you can do so easily as the “winner” could be used for future benchmarks or as a template for your next A/B tests.

Testing at the same time vs testing at different times

Although you can absolutely A/B test your emails based on sending days and hours, try to avoid sending variants at different times: you won’t know if the changes were caused by the time or the email content.

Tracking results and building on your findings

Running email A/B tests makes no sense if you don’t actively track your campaigns results afterwards.

There are 4 main metrics that should you track in order to measure success:

Open Rate
Click-through Rate
Response Rate
Subsequent Conversion Rate

For most campaigns, open rates and click-through rates will be your basic performance indicators and you should track any sensible change, be it positive or negative.

On certain campaigns (namely lead generation and ecommerce promotional offers), you’ll also want to actively track the conversion rate associated with your call-to-action.

Simply put, you should track sales or the number of forms completed on your website derived from your email analytics in order to measure your overall return on investment.

In these scenarios, you’ll be tracking real conversions instead of the number of opened emails which will provide you with much more tangible data for your marketing analysis.

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Jun 21, 2018

10min read

How A Customer Journey Map Can Help You Improve User Experience

Anthony Brebion

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s interaction with a business or website. It is used to define which parts of this process might not be working as smoothly as they should be, thus improving the customer’s experience. When used properly, it can engender customer loyalty, positive word of mouth and a more efficient business model.

What Is A Customer Journey Map?

The customer journey map is a (mostly) visual tool that helps businesses understand what a customer goes through when buying a product or service from them. It maps out in clear, concise, visual terms, the journey each customer is likely to experience through buyer personas and user data.

Buyer personas are at the heart of a customer journey map tool and are broad representations, presented as fictional characters, based on real-life data and customer feedback. Typically, each project will create between three and seven buyer personas, each of which will require its own customer journey map.

The point of the customer journey map is to understand, as clearly as possible, what a customer will encounter when using your service. It will also help you improve the elements that are not functioning properly, are not easy to navigate and show you how to make the entire experience more satisfying.

Each persona, and therefore the journey map itself, is not meant to be a perfect illustration of actual interactions. Rather it is a broad representation of the experience from the persona’s perspective.

The best customer journey map is a story, brought to life visually, of the customer’s experience. In essence, the best customer journey map is a story, brought to life visually, of the customer’s experience. It should be noted, however, that more complex information on the map may require text.

The map itself highlights “touchpoints, which are specific elements of the customer’s interaction with a business. Each of these touchpoints – for example, seeking a product, researching its content, buying the product, waiting for delivery and returning it if unsatisfied – can be judged as negative, neutral or positive from the customer’s perspective.

Customer journey maps require various research techniques that include hard data, customer feedback, and creative thinking. As such, no two maps are the same and each one will depend on many different factors that can’t be simplified or stereotyped as a matter of course.

Who Can Benefit From A Customer Journey Map?

There are many reasons why a customer journey map can be useful to a business. Modern day marketing is hugely focused on the individual, with personalization gaining traction in almost all sectors.

This means that customer satisfaction is more important than ever to a business and tied to loyalty to an extent that has not previously existed. Customers are more demanding, aware of their options and willing to shop around.

By mapping each of the previously mentioned touchpoints, a well-designed customer journey map template can highlight any problems that clients might experience in the process of interacting with a business and help foster a relationship with an organization, product, service or brand. This can occur across multiple channels and over a long period of time.

Once a customer journey map template has been designed, the entire enterprise can keep the customer at the forefront of the decision-making process. With a focus on the customer and their experience, or user experience (UX), any kinks, holes or brick walls within the timeline’s touchpoints can be ironed out.

Bringing Together All Aspects Of The Business

Another way in which a customer journey map can help is by bringing together departments with a focus on customer experience. To begin with, all departments can be engaged to discuss issues that customers may face when dealing with them. This is no small thing as many departments may not be used to dealing with customers, yet the decisions they take may have a profound effect on UX. By creating an understanding of how each touchpoint affects UX across the entire business, decisions can be made from an empathetic perspective.

Traditional marketing stops at the point of purchase, but customer experience does not necessarily end there. For example, perhaps the purchase was not to their satisfaction and they want to return the goods. Departments that might not typically be involved in touchpoints before purchase now have a central role to play. How easy is it for the customer to find the return information on a website? If they need information on delivery, or collection times, how likely are they to get a response that will satisfy them? This all requires forethought and a policy that keeps customer experience central to design and organization.

How To Create A Customer Journey Map

Customer journey mapping templates appear complex at first glance, but there are some tried and tested, step by step methods that can simplify the process immeasurably.

These are:

Building personas
Defining touchpoints
Aligning goals against each touchpoint
Deciding where these goals are and are not being met
Prioritizing changes

Building Personas

Building personas is in itself a skill, into which we won’t go into minute detail here, but broadly speaking, this is the most time-consuming part of the process. It requires detailed research, including qualitative and quantitative data, and is the foundation of the entire process. A persona is a highly relatable and rounded fictional character, generalized, but not stereotyped.

Defining Touchpoints

All customer journey mapping examples are unique. This is because every sector, every busine, s and every website is, to some degree, unique. Therefore, touchpoints on one map are unlikely to work for another. In fact, every business needs to update its buyer personas and customer journey maps as their business changes. Even quite subtle changes can have profound effects on the customer journey map template.

As previously described, touchpoints are places on the map where the customer is interacting with your business or website. These should be thought about carefully and involve all aspects of the business. There is a good chance you will be surprised by the input of seemingly irrelevant departments when it comes to UX.

Aligning Goals Against Each Touchpoint

Depending on the nature of the map, this is often considered the most difficult part of the entire process. Defining is based on the previously described data and needs to be mapped onto the previously described touchpoints. Think of it like those handheld toys where you have to align each silver ball with a hole, every time one falls into place, another pops out.

The main reason this is often a difficult process is that customer goals have been largely overlooked when designing websites, with attention grabbing elements, upselling and site engagement prioritized over ease of use and efficiency of the process. Getting this balance right is essential for a customer journey map to be effective.

Deciding Where These Goals Are And Are Not Being Met

Now you have your data, customer journey mapping template, touchpoints and goals, it’s time to put it all together and define where the UX is meeting expectation and where things can be improved. It is important to note that mapping where things are going well is almost as important as defining what isn’t. Some elements of the journey can be spread to other areas and you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

One of the best ways of understanding where things are not going to plan is through customer feedback. This is typically done through surveys and customer support transcripts. It is a foolish business that pays little attention to what its customers are telling them.

Prioritizing Changes

No matter how positive you may think customer experience is going, the chances are you will now have highlighted more than one blind spot. At this point, it is important to prioritize which touchpoints should be acted upon. Occasionally this will be obvious, such as a convoluted check out process where customers are abandoning their carts at a higher rate than is normal, but not all roadblocks will be so easy to define or prioritize.

One of the best ways to define which parts of a website needs changing will be the cost effectiveness of a page. Tweaking aspects of the most important parts of the website, which can involve some trial and error and detailed customer feedback, based on hard data, A/B testing and other methods, can produce instant results.

Best Practices

While each website is different, depending on a variety of factors, there are some universal truths that can generally be applied to all. [click_to_tweet tweet=”Customer journey mapping definitions rarely align, but put simply, they are designed to get the customer from A to B as smoothly as possible” quote=”Customer journey mapping definitions rarely align, but put simply, they are designed to get the customer from A to B as smoothly as possible”]. Customer journey maps are therefore about simplification and the same is true for the maps themselves. The whole point of visually constructing a map is so it is easy to comprehend issues, which are easily highlighted and acted upon. These maps are not complex collages, in fact, they can be little more than color coded, linear lines with dots as touchpoints. However you construct the map, it should be easy to follow.

Customer Journey Map Examples

Customer journey map templates are varied, some appear like works of art, while others the work of a child, but as long as they are clear and concise, they can be effective.

This customer journey map for the charity ‘The Samaritans’ is a highly empathetic map, focused on the purpose of the charity itself.

Note how the text is highly visual and therefore makies it easy to relate to the image of the map itself.

This is an example of a map that gives the impression of a journey, rather than a linear UX. This can help push home the point that customer experience is rarely easy to define as a journey from A to B.

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Jun 8, 2018

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A Beginner’s Guide to Usability & User Testing

Anthony Brebion

In a digital world that mainly relies on a customer-centric approach and data-driven technologies, collecting user feedback is key to developing successful products, be they apps, websites, or services.

In order to design products and services that truly answer customers needs and expectations, effective companies use iterative design processes whose sole purpose is to constantly allow for better user experiences.

Usability testing is all about asking people and monitoring how intuitive and how easy is it to use a product.

Many people assume that usability testing only happens in the pre-launch design phase.

That’s not the case.

In fact, developing an iterative design process implies implementing repeated user tests at every stage of your product lifecycle.

Why?

Mostly because your product will undergo multiple new versions, features, and services that will all require user tests to validate assumptions.

Because digital marketers and UX researchers have long studied the methods and processes to harvest user insights, many different usability testing options have emerged in recent years.

What Exactly is Usability Testing?

Usability Testing and User Tests

Usability tests are processes designed to observe and track real users while they use a product to measure its usability and user-friendliness in order to achieve marketing objectives.

Moderated or not, your usability tests are meant to harvest user insights in order to develop an efficient user experience and design an overall better product.

Usability tests are used to confront assumptions before launching a new product or releasing a new feature.

They are also useful to measure a product’s efficiency in its current version in order to identify possible pain points and therefore solve them.

Your Objectives Behind Usability Testing

Because development and marketing teams often have to cope with tight deadlines and management pressure the temptation to skip any usability testing phase can be strong.

But this could cost you a lot.

In fact, usability testing should be included in your product development roadmap from the beginning.

That way, you’ll be certain to have time to actually carry out proper user tests.

Why is usability testing so important?

As a product developer, your job is to deliver a product or service that is:

Efficient
User-friendly
Profitable

In order to achieve these 3 objectives, your goal is to gather as much feedback as you can before actually releasing the product or the feature.

With this in mind, your user tests will have to deliver meaningful insights that will eventually lead to product updates.

Note: the objectives behind usability testing differ from one product to another.

However, here are some crucial objectives that can be tracked through user tests, regardless of your company’s product.

Do people enjoy using your product?
Are users able to successfully complete pre-determined tasks?
Does the product match your core target’s expectations?
How easy to use is your product?
Are users pleased with the interface, colors, buttons, forms?

Now that we covered the general aspects of usability testing, let’s take a closer look at the different types of usability tests that you can implement in order to develop a better product.

Moderated & Unmoderated User Tests

a) Moderated User Tests

What are moderated user tests?

Moderated user testing consists of different tests run on users with the presence of moderators.

These moderators will guide test participants, answer their questions and harvest useful feedback.

Although moderators might interfere with the live experience, moderated tests are useful to ask precise questions at very specific stages in order to collect targeted feedback based on assumptions.

These tests are a great opportunity for companies developing prototypes that require extensive feedback in the early design phases.

Using moderated tests, you will be able to gather actionable insights that will save your company precious time and money that would otherwise have been spent on a costly inefficient prototype.

Key takeaway: moderated user tests are specifically adapted to early-stage products and services because moderators can guide participants through the process. However, be careful so that your moderators don’t actually tell users what to do: the user experience has to remain natural.

Good to know: moderated user tests can either be run remotely or with the actual presence of participants.

Naturally, having users come to you or vice versa will cost you more than remote tests.

Although both types of tests are viable, you will usually generate more reaction from the participants during a real live test than a remote test.

b) Unmoderated User Tests

As the name suggests, unmoderated user tests are led without any supervision from your side.

Generally, these types of test are run remotely without the presence of a moderator.

These tests require the use of specific tools or SaaS platforms to automatically gather user insights and record their interactions for a delayed analysis.

During unmoderated tests, users are assigned pre-determined tasks to complete and are invited to express their thoughts and struggles out loud.

Using this solution, your company will then analyze users’ reactions that have been recorded during the tests.

Key Takeaway: unmoderated tests are definitely cheaper and easier to implement. Solution providers like UserTesting can deliver ready-to-use panels tailored to your core target in a matter of hours, which is extremely convenient compared to having to manually recruit participants.

Because there’s no involvement from your side apart from designing and reviewing user tests, unmoderated tests can also be run simultaneously and on a much larger scale.

Good to know: unmoderated tests don’t necessarily replace moderated tests – they rather complete each other.

Because there will be no supervision from your side, it is highly advised to craft crystal-clear guidelines and expectations to avoid confusion among users.

Focus Groups

Focus Group

Focus groups are specific processes that consist of inviting approximately 10 participants to discuss their needs and expectations about your product.

These tests can be run both before and after a product’s release – depending on your objectives.

Contrary to moderated user tests, focus groups are used to discuss participants’ needs, expectations and feelings about your product rather than just evaluating your design’s usability.

Typically, moderators will create a set of predetermined questions that will lead to multiple discussions regarding how participants feel about your product or certain features.

Key Takeaway: focus groups are useful to gather insights about your users’ potential needs and expectations. Used in complement with moderated or unmoderated user tests, they will provide meaningful feedback that can be leveraged to create new features or rethink the user interface.

Beta Tests & Surveys

Although they truly differ from other user tests, beta tests can be extremely useful to provide your usability testing process with a more quantitative approach.

Simply put, beta tests consist in giving access to a new feature or product to a restrained number of voluntary participants.

Because beta tests require a large sample, companies can find it difficult to recruit a sufficient and representative number of beta-testers for the test to be viable.

However, beta tests can become a priceless opportunity to uncover many usability issues at once, comforted by a large variety of opinions coming from hundreds or thousands of participants.

Particularly popular in the video game industry, beta tests can also be used to test your MVP (minimum viable product) before your final product actually launches.

Using the same quantitative approach, surveys and online questionnaires are a cheap, quick and semi-reliable way to gather feedback on your product.

For these to work, you will have to address the right audience if you want relevant answers to appear in your questionnaires.

Surveys are useful when it comes to quantitative comparison.

Example: Your company develops a new fashion marketplace and hesitates between two logo designs: you could send survey questionnaires to your target audience that would ask to choose between the two designs.

A/B Tests

Agreed, these tests are a bit different – but they really work.

As opposed to most of the other tests we’ve mentioned, A/B tests are run on your product’s current version in order to determine which of two design options is better.

A/B Testing and User Tests

Example: let’s say that your company runs an ecommerce website and recently created a new product page layout. Your team wants to decide between the two layouts (version A & B) without compromising on conversions: they will use A/B testing to sort this out and choose a “winner” from these two options.

A/B tests can be conveniently used to track all sorts of “goals” depending on your website or product – which is extremely convenient to gather data and boost your current product’s usability and user-friendliness.

Did you like this article? Feel free to share and check out our other in-depth articles on how to optimize your website, ecommerce and digital marketing.

AB Tasty is a complete personalization and A/B testing software integrating cutting-edge features so that you, as a marketer, can take action now and increase your website’s performance.

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May 29, 2018

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How to A/B Test Without Jeopardizing your SEO Efforts

Anthony Brebion

A/B testing is an effective way to improve your site’s user experience and its ability to convert users to clients.

While changes made to your site may impact your user’s behavior, they are also seen by search engine crawlers, especially Google. The latter is perfectly capable of interpreting JavaScript, the scripting technology behind a lot of A/B tests.

As A/B testing experts, we are often asked about the impact of A/B testing on our clients’ organic search rankings. If SEO is not taken into account, an A/B testing campaign can impact the visibility of the site, notably for tests based on URL redirects.

This post is a good opportunity to review A/B testing best practices for SEO and help you do what’s best when it comes to optimizing conversions, without jeopardizing your rankings and web traffic.

General SEO recommendations

To start, let’s review some general recommendations from Google.

Google completely accepts A/B testing and even encourages it if it’s geared towards improving user experience. Google also offers its own client-side A/B testing tool (Google Optimize) that uses JavaScript to manipulate the DOM (Document Object Model) to create page variations.

On its blog, Google shares rules to be respected so that its algorithms do not penalize your site. The main rule concerns opening your test to the search engine’s robots, who must navigate on the same version of your pages as your visitors.

So, one of the first best practices for SEO is to not exclude Google’s bot from your A/B tests. Even if your A/B testing solution offers some advanced user-targeting capabilities, like user-agent detection, do not use them to exclude Googlebot.

It is also recommended that you do not display pages that are too different from one another to your users. For one, it will be more difficult to identify which element(s) had a greater impact on the conversion rate. Second, Google may consider the two versions to be different and to interpret that action as a manipulation attempt. Losing ranking may result or, worst case scenario, your site may be completely removed.

Depending on your objectives, the A/B testing setup may differ and each way of doing things can have an impact on SEO.

Best practices for A/B tests with URL redirects

A/B testing using URL redirects, also known as split testing, is one of these methods. Instead of using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to design your variation, you redirect users to a completely separate page, often hosted on your site, that has its own URL. Using this method is justified if you have a lot of changes to make on your page; for example, when you want to test a different design or another landing page concept.

This use case is the most prone to error and can have a dramatic impact on your search engine ranking, namely your original page being removed from the Google index, and replaced by your variant page. To avoid this, remember the following points:

Never block Google’s bots via your site’s robots.txt file with the Disallow instruction or by adding the noindex command on your alternate pages. The first prevents bots from reading the content of targeted pages, whereas the latter prevents them from adding the pages to Google’s index. It’s a common error, as the site publisher is afraid that the alternate version will appear in results. If you respect the following instructions, there is no reason for your alternate version to “rank” instead of your original version.
Place a canonical attribute on the variant page and set the value to the original page. This tells Google the original page is the one it must take into account and offer to internet users. Search engine bots will understand that page B has no added value compared to A, which is the only version to be indexed. In the case of a test on a set of pages (e.g. you want to test 2 product page formats across your catalog), you must set up this matching for each page.
Redirect visitors via a 302 or JavaScript redirection, both of which Google interprets as temporary redirects. In other words, the search engine considers it to be a temporary modification of your site and does not modify its index accordingly.
When a redirect test is completed, you must put into production the changes that have been shown to be useful. The original page A is then modified to include the new elements that foster conversion. Page B, meanwhile, can either be redirected to page A with a 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary, if the page will be used for other tests) redirection.

Best practices for standard A/B tests

Applying a JavaScript overlay is by far the most common way to conduct A/B tests. In this case, your variants are no more or less than changes applied on the fly when the page loads into the user’s browser. The A/B testing solution manages the whole process from the JavaScript code interpretation of changes you made via a graphics editor, up to data collection, by randomly assigning users to one of the variants and respecting this assignment throughout the test. In this case, your URLs do not change and changes only occur in the client browser (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.).

This type of A/B test does not harm your SEO efforts. While Google is perfectly capable of understanding JavaScript code, these changes will not be a problem if you do not try to trick it by showing it an initial content that is very different from that presented to users. Therefore, make sure that:

The number of elements called by the overlay is limited given the overall page and that the test does not overhaul the page’s structure or content.
The overlays do not delete or hide elements that are important for the page’s ranking and improve its legitimacy in the eyes of Google (text areas, title, images, internal links, etc.).
Only run the experiment as long as necessary. Google knows that the time required for a test will vary depending on how much traffic the tested page gets, but says you should avoid running tests for an unnecessarily long time as they may interpret this as an attempt to deceive, especially if you’re serving one content variant to a large percentage of your users.

Tips:
While it’s better to avoid overlay phases that are too heavy on pages generating traffic, you have complete freedom for pages that Google’s bots do not browse or that do not have an SEO benefit (account or basket pages, purchase tunnel pages, etc.). Don’t hesitate to test new optimizations on these pages that are key to your conversion rate!

What about mobile SEO?

Using your A/B testing solution to improve the user journey on mobile devices is a use case that we sometimes encounter. This is a particularly sensitive point for SEO since Google is rolling out its Mobile First Indexing.

Until now, Google’s ranking algorithm was based primarily on the content of a site’s desktop version to position it in both desktop and mobile search results. With the Mobile First Indexing algorithm, Google is switching this logic around: the search engine will now use the mobile page’s content as a ranking signal rather than the desktop version, no matter what the device.

Therefore, it’s particularly important to not remove from mobile navigation – for UX reasons – elements that are vital to SEO, like, for example, removing page-top content that takes up too much space on a smartphone.

Can personalization impact your SEO?

Some A/B testing tools also offer user personalization capabilities. AB Tasty, for example, helps you boost user engagement via custom scenarios. Depending on your visitors’ profile or their journeys on your website, you can easily offer them messages or a personalized browsing experience that is more likely to help them convert.

Can these practices have an impact on your SEO? Like for A/B tests using JavaScript, impact from SEO is limited but some special cases should be taken into consideration.

For instance, highlighting customized content with an interstitial (pop-in) presents a challenge in terms of SEO, notably on mobile. Since January 2017, Google considers it to be harmful to the user experience since the page’s content is not easily accessible. So personalized interstitials must be adjusted to Google’s expectations. Otherwise, you take the risk of seeing your site lose ranking and the resulting traffic.

Note that Google seems to tolerate legal interstitials that take up a majority of the screen (cookie information, age verification, etc.) for which there is no SEO impact.

To learn more, download your free copy of our A/B testing 101 ebook.