Split Testing Product Summaries in WooCommerce

Hi everyone! Today we’ll have a look at one technique to increase product sales in a WooCommerce store with Nelio A/B Testing. We’ve explained everything in the following short video. No technical knowledge is required. Just sit down, click on Play, and discover how easy things can be with Nelio!

For those of you who don’t know what WooCommerce is, it’s a simple solution that transforms your WordPress site into a powerful e-commerce, giving you the power to sell anything.

Let’s assume we have a WooCommerce store and we want to increase the sales of a Nelio T-Shirt. In order to do this, we could switch to a more friendly picture (with a man wearing the T-Shirt and smiling), or change its name and description, so we end up with this alternative version of our product:

Let’s see how we can split test this scenario with Nelio A/B Testing! First, go to your WordPress Dashboard. On the Nelio A/B Testing menu, click on Add Experiment. Here you have all the different types of experiments you can create with Nelio. The one we need today is WooCommerce Product Summary.

Now let’s fill out the basic information of the experiment. Name the experiment, describe what you plan to do, and select the product you want to test. Once you’re done, click on Next to create one or more alternatives for the selected product.

To create the new alternative, click on New Product Summary. If you want to test a new name or a different product description, go ahead and type in the alternative versions. To change the image, click on the current image and select a new one from your WordPress Media Library. Then, click on Create to save the new alternative. You’ll get the two alternatives (the original one, and the alternative you’ve just created) as shown in here:

Note that you can create as many alternatives as you want by repeating the process, but in this example we’ll only create one. Once they’re all ready, click on Create to create the experiment. You’ll see the experiment we just produced in the list of experiments. To run the experiment, just click on Start. Nelio warns you that experiments cannot be edited while running, so make sure you didn’t miss anything. Click on Start again to dismiss the popup and continue.

You can see the results of the experiment at any time by using the View link. However, there might be no results right after starting the experiment. Just give it some time and Nelio will collect and process your visitors’ actions.

Let’s take a brief look at the results. The first box shows the current status of the experiment. In the example, we have a clear winner. How cool is that?! It also tells us that the alternative product summary is better, as we had originally anticipated. We can also see the conversion rates of each alternative over time, as well as some basic information of the experiment. The two final charts show the conversion rate of each version, and the improvement factor of each alternative with respect to the original version.

On the Alternatives tab we have the details of each alternative, such as their conversions and the number of page views. And, of course, you can preview each alternative at any time. To do that just click on Preview.

The last tab shows the conversion actions that the experiment takes into account. In this case, a conversion occurs whenever an order that contains the tested product is completed.

Once there is a winner, you can stop the experiment by clicking on the Stop button. Nelio warns you that experiments cannot be resumed; if that’s OK, click on Stop again.

Finally, there’s only one thing left: since the summary of the alternative product was better, you have to make it permanent so that all your visitors see it. To do this, go to the Alternatives tab and click on the Apply button of the winning alternative. Confirm that you want to overwrite the original content and you’re done!

What if the experiment failed and the alternative ended up being worse? Well, thanks to Nelio you didn’t introduce those changes in your site, which, as you’ve just discovered, would have led you to worst conversion rates.

There are hundreds of thousands of different combinations that can be tested on any given website, so why don’t you go ahead and create a new experiment in your WordPress site?

Stay tuned for the upcoming videos!