What is A/B testing? « Reachd Blog

What is A/B testing?

Last week I did a video interview with Tom Leung of Google. Tom is the head of the Google Website Optimizer team. Google website optimizer is a free tool from Google which allows you to test your website copy. You setup a test and the tool gives you a bit of code to add to each of your pages and then website optimizer shows one page to 1/2 of your visitors and the other page to another 1/2 of your visitors. Once you’ve accumulated some data the tool tells you which page is “better” You can watch this 4 minute video in this post for a demo of A/B testing with Google Website Optimizer.

10 Responses to “What is A/B testing?”

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1 Derek September 16, 2008 at 3:11 pm

Great explanation of a powerful (and free) method for improving your website. And further, great video presentation. Fantastic job, Rodney!

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2 Jonathan October 1, 2008 at 8:53 pm

I get confused with what this is for. Is this used to test a “Website” or a PPC “Landing Page”? If it’s for a website, how would you have traffic going to 2 of the same index or home pages to compare to? Same goes for the Landing page. Would you have 2 ads running that are the same but with different aspects used for testing? I’m really confused!

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3 reachd October 1, 2008 at 9:01 pm

Jonathan,

When you setup your A/B test Website optimizer provides you with a bit of javascript code which you place on your 2 test pages. This javascript code then handles the magic of splitting your web traffic in half.

So it is 1 ad, which is clicked on and the javascript divides the traffic to the separate pages.

You could use website optimizer to test a webpage or a PPC landing page. Optimizer was originally introduced as a part of Adwords, but now you can use it independent of adwords.

Let me know if you have more questions.

Rodney

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4 Louellen October 3, 2008 at 11:50 pm

Excellent description. I’ve read about it, know about it, but this makes it look easier than I am anticipating.

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5 SEO-PRO October 6, 2008 at 10:58 am

I’d like to alter the layout/design of my Blog based on statistical evidence from Optimiser and I just wanted to know if it is compatible with WordPress and Blogger?

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6 Philips December 30, 2008 at 8:59 am

Superb explanation. Its is so simple and optimistic

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7 Richard January 30, 2009 at 4:43 am

We actually found website optimizer to be a bit painful, personally, I would recommend reading and implementing this:

http://blog.mixpanel.com/2009/01/ab-testing-your-website-with-mixpanel/

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