One of the most common problems you face as a WordPress website owner is to know how to increase the revenues you get from the promotions, affiliate links, or advertisements you include in your sidebars. As you can imagine, the answer is running a split test in your WordPress site and, in particular, a split test of the widgets you use in those sidebars.
Luckily for you, these tests are super easy with Nelio’s Widget Tests! Let’s see how to create and run this type of experiments. In today’s example we’ll compare what produces more sales of a certain product: just one special offer for that product in the sidebar, or a list of featured products that includes it.
First, go to your WordPress Dashboard. On the Nelio A/B Testing menu, click on “Add Experiment” and select “New Widget Test”.
Then, let’s fill out the basic information of the experiment. Name the experiment, describe what you plan to do, and select the widgets set you want to test. Once you’re done, click “Next” to create one or more alternatives for your selected widget set.
Then, create a new alternative widget set. Type a name for the new alternative and click to create. Then, click to “Save Experiment & Edit Widgets” to edit it.
As you’ll see, you’ll be able to use the built-in WordPress Editor for editing your new set of widgets. By default, Nelio includes no widgets in your alternatives, and it’s up to you whether you add new widgets from scratch or duplicate the original widget set and tweak it by adding, removing, or rearranging your widgets.
In our case we simply need to duplicate our current set of widgets and tweak it a little bit. In particular, we’ll remove the “WooCommerce Top Rated products”, add the special offer for just one product, and re-arrange the display order of the widgets.
Once you’re done, go back to edit the experiment and set up its goals. Note that alternative widget sets are automatically saved whilst editing. In this experiment we wanted to see which alternative widget set produces more sells of a particular product. So let’s click on the WooCommerce shopping cart icon (in the Goals tab when editing the experiment) and select that product.
Finally, just click on “Save” to save the experiment.
Then, you can see the experiment you just produced. To launch it, hover over the experiment and click on Start.
Once Nelio has collected and processed some data about your visitors’ behavior, you’ll be able to view the performance of the experiment.
Just wait until Nelio finds a winner (if any) and stop the experiment by clicking on the “Stop” button.
If one of the variants has won (as it did in our example), make it permanent by going to the “Alternatives” tab and clicking on the “Apply” button. This way, you’ll overwrite the original widget set with the winner!
There’s plenty of tests that you can run on Nelio, so why don’t you go ahead and create your next experiment?
Stay tuned for the upcoming videos.
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