A/B tests are the best tool to improve your WooCommerce store. In a nutshell, an A/B test consists of, based on an improvement hypothesis, proposing a change to your website. For example, modify the home page to better display certain relevant information, change the description, image and prices of the products to see which ones get more sales or radically change the theme to make it more attractive, etc.
Next, the traffic has to be split so that half of the visitors see the original version and the other half see the changed version. This way you can analyze if that change works better than what you had before.
If you have a WooCommerce store, running A/B tests can help you improve your website in many ways:
- Improve the user experience based on their preferences and knowing which visual elements (images, videos, designs, fonts, colors, etc.) are more attractive to them.
- Reduce the cost of customer acquisition by improving the content with headlines, texts, and descriptions that address the questions that your prospects may have.
- Reduce the abandonment rate by comparing different landing styles, completely changing the theme, menus, or any other element.
- Improve the conversion rate by increasing sales and revenues by making sure that your products are attractive and interesting to your visitors.
In this post we will see how to easily create A/B tests in your WooCommerce store.
Table of Contents
Conversion Rate Optimization Process
A/B tests are part of a more ambitious process known as the Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO process. Let’s see what this process is and what it consists of.
Every time a visitor arrives to your website, it is an opportunity for you to get a sale in your store, for them to contact you to ask for more information about a product, or to subscribe to your mailing list to receive offers. When the visitor performs any of these actions, we will have achieved a “conversion.” What is the main objective of your store? To achieve the maximum number of conversions, or rather, that the ratio or conversion rate (number of conversions achieved with respect to the number of visits) is as high as possible.
The process of optimizing the conversion ratio, thus, consists of the following steps:
- Define the objectives of your e-commerce in the different phases of your sales funnel. For example, increase the number of subscribers to the mailing list, increase the visits to the detail of the products, increase sales, etc.
- Analyze the website, assessing what problems it might currently have that slow down or prevent you from achieving the previously defined goals.
- Generate hypotheses for improvement and test ideas to be carried out. For example, you might hypothesize that, if you change the image, description, and price of a product, it will be more attractive and you will get more sales.
- Create and run A/B tests with the ideas generated and analyze their impact. That is, create one or more variants of what you had until now, split the traffic, and look at the data.
After running the test you will see if one of the variants has been the winner and you will be confident that the final design you’ll run has proven to be the best, thus leading to more conversions. From this point, you can create more A/B tests with each of the ideas generated in point 2.
Create Your Own A/B Tests With Nelio A/B Testing
How do we create these A/B tests in our store without writing a single line of code? Very easy if you use our Nelio A/B Testing plugin. Just click on Add Test and select the type of test you want to run on your store.
As you can see in the image above, you have a wide assortment of tests to choose from. For each of them, you’ll have to:
- name the test to identify it,
- define the variant(s) you want to test,
- specify the goals and conversion actions of the test,
- specify whether you want to segment the traffic that participates in the test,
- run the test to gather data, and
- improve the website according to the results you got.
WooCommerce Product Summary Test
Let’s start by looking at how you define a WooCommerce product summary test, surely the most relevant type of test and with which you can get the most impactful results in your store.
In a WooCommerce Product Summary test, you test the different combinations of a product name, short description, image, and price, with the intention of discovering which one is more successful at driving purchases.
Name the Test and Define the Variants
Creating this type of test is very simple. After clicking on the WooCommerce Product Summary icon, the test editor opens for you to fill in the test info. Name the test and then select the product you want to test using this component:
Once selected, you will see the summary of the selected product. By default, your B variant will be an exact copy of your selected product, but you can tweak it as you see fit:
Write new copies in the provided fields or change the image by clicking on it and selecting a new one from the media library. You can even add more variants if you want to!
Specify Conversion Goals and Actions
WooCommerce product summary tests have an implicit goal: to get your visitors to buy the product you are testing. In this case, a conversion is counted every time an order containing said product is completed.
However, you have the option to change the conversion goal by selecting any other order status available in your store. To do this, simply click on the dropdown list and select the status an order containing the tested product should be in for it to be counted as a conversion.
You can also check or uncheck, if you want Nelio A/B Testing to track the revenue and show them in the test results.
Optionally Segment Test Traffic
Visitors to your store are not all the same. They come from different countries, speak different languages, use different browsers, access the site from different web pages, use different devices, and a host of other subtle and major differences.
Nelio A/B Testing allows you to delimit the audience that you want to participate in an A/B test by defining through rules a set of common characteristics that you want to participate in your test. Here you will find more detailed information on how to create segments in a test.
Run the Test and Analyze the Results
Once the test is ready, all you have to do is press the “Start…” button. With the premium version you have the option to schedule the start of the test on a certain date and you can also specify if you want it to automatically finish when some condition is met (e.g. after a certain period of time, having reached a certain number of visits or when a winner with a certain level of confidence has been found).
And that’s it! You don’t have to worry about anything else, as Nelio A/B Testing will make sure that the traffic coming to your website is properly split so that each visitor sees one of the three available variants.
After starting the test, on the results page you will be able to see various graphs depicting its progress, the evolution of the conversion rate for each alternative, and the degree of improvement they have compared to the original variant.
If you have marked to track the price, you also have a graph that shows you the evolution of the accumulated revenue.
Improve the Website According to the Results Obtained
If you have not specified that the test should end when certain conditions are met, stop the test when there’s a clear winner (i.e. there’s at least a 90% confidence) or when you feel like there won’t be one. This information is always available on the results page.
If there’s a winning variant and it’s one of the alternatives, you can click on the “Apply” button on the results page and the contents of the original product summary will be replaced with the contents of the winning variant.
In this way, according to the preferences of your visitors, you will have improved the WooCommerce product summary. Now, in your WooCommerce store you can continue creating tests for all your products or you can also create other types of tests that I discuss below.
Page Test
Page testing allows you to test and improve the design and content of any page on your website, such as the home page of your WooCommerce store.
Creating a page test is similar to the test we have seen above. After clicking on the page icon and giving the test a name to identify it, you only have to select which page of your store you want to test from the drop-down menu.
To create one or more variants, you can select to test the original page against already existing (and published) pages on your site, or create a new variant for this test specifically. If you opt for the latter, new variants will start as an exact copy of the tested page, but you can tweak them as you please using your preferred page builder:
So, for example, you can change the cover block you display on the home page to a media and text block and make any other changes you feel are necessary to improve the page.
After saving the variant, go back to the test edition using the link in the sidebar. And as in the previous test, you can add additional variants.
When it comes to specifying conversion goals and actions, many conversion actions are available to you when performing a page test:
- to visit a page, a post or certain content,
- to click on a button or any element on the page,
- to visit an external link,
- to submit a completed form,
- to add a product to the shopping cart,
- to buy a product, and/or
- a custom event occurs.
On this page you will find more details on how to define the different conversion actions for each type of test.
Thus, for example, in our case we can specify as a conversion goal the interest shown by visitors in our products, and as conversion actions that they add products to the shopping cart and that they buy these products.
The results page of a page test is very similar to the previous example, although in this case we will only have the graphs corresponding to the conversion rate. And as before, you can apply the changes of the winning variant to your website with a single click.
Nelio A/B Testing
Native Tests for WordPress
Use your WordPress page editor to create variants and run powerful tests with just a few clicks. No coding skills required.
Try Alternative Layouts: Test Menus, Templates, CSS styles and Themes
Before making radical style and design changes without knowing the impact they will have, create A/B tests of menus, templates, CSS styles, or even test different themes and analyze what is most successful with your customers.
The process of creating variants is very similar to what we have already seen. In the case testing a menu, once you have selected the menu you want to test, a copy of the original menu will be created as a variant so that you can edit it with the menu editor and make the changes you want. Similarly, when editing CSS style variants, the CSS style editor will open for you to add any CSS rules you want.
In the case of template tests, you must have previously created the alternative template and select it as a variant. And to test different themes, you must make sure that you have previously installed them on your site.
The rest of the process to get the results of your A/B test is very similar to the above, but feel free to check the following links on these types of tests for more details:
Conclusion
All websites, and especially WooCommerce stores, should be continually updated and improved to increase sales. A/B testing is the best tool for this, and the Nelio A/B Testing plugin makes it easy for you so that the process is as easy as creating any other page.
What are you waiting for to improve your WooCommerce store and increase sales?
Featured image by Abi Schreider on Unsplash.
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