Tasting Menu with Nelio A/B Testing

Restaurant tasting menus offer small portions of several dishes as a single meal. Some restaurants and chefs specialize in tasting menus, while in other cases, it is a special or a menu option. A tasting menu dinner in a restaurant should be an experience that serves to test what they are doing in it and the urge to come back to dine again soon!

Navigation menu of your website is similar to a tasting menu in a restaurant. From the moment a visitor lands on your site, the navigation menu provides an overall idea of what you offer, prioritizes what’s important, and directs the flow of traffic where you want it to go. Therefore, testing out the display order and titles of your navigation menu is well worth for improving the conversion of your website.

As with any type of A/B testing, you shouldn’t create random experiments that aren’t based on a specific question—you first should always start identifying your goals and then establishing new hypothesis.

Identify your goals

To identify goals means to identify which are the elements of your website that bring you the most overall profit. This step is crucial to know which results to any A/B tests are more desirable.

For example, in our MigrateToWP website we offer a service for migrating a website from any CMS to WordPress. Our main goal is to sell the service, but this isn’t the only one. We also are interested in people:

• Reading our Nelio’s blog, and
• Visiting our Nelio A/B Testing website.

Create a new hypothesis

In order to create new hypothesis, let’s first analyse the current navigation menu. By focusing in the two goals above, we should ask ourselves whether the current structure eases to find (a) our blog and (b) our A/B testing website.

The questions are clue to think about any possible problem with the current structure and then, come up with a plan for what you’re going to change. In our current example, we may think about:

1. Having a distinct “Blog” menu tab on the main menu
2. Having a distinct “Nelio A/B Testing” tab on the main menu
3. Having the “NGO service” tab under the Services menu

My hypothesis is that these changes make more visible the Blog and the A/B Testing tabs to the visitors just when landing to the main site and, therefore, this may incite to click them. On the other hand, the “For NGO/NPOs” can also be understood as a special service, so it may be quite intuitive to be under the “Our Services” tab menu.

Start creating your Menu test

You should never rely on your hypothesis without testing them. So, let’s easily perform this experiment with Nelio A/B Testing. Getting started only requires a subscription to one of our plans and the installation of our plugin in your WordPress site. Once you’re ready, simply click New Menu Test to start!

Nelio A/B Testing

I was very impressed by the quality of this plugin, how easy it was to set up, and the outstanding support Nelio provides. I highly recommend Nelio A/B Testing.

Josette Millar

WordPress.org

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Fill out the Basic Information

First, fill out the Basic Information of the Menu experiment under the General Tab.

Basically, you just have to define (1) a meaningful name for the experiment with an optional description, then (2) select the menu you want to put under test, and finally (3) decide under which condition the running experiment should stop.

See our running example below:

Create Alternative Menu(s) for Split Testing

Then, under the Alternatives tab, (1) choose the New Alternative Menu (based on an existing one), (2) set up the new name of the menu, (3) select the original menu (Main Menu) to duplicate the menu’s items and create the alternative one,  and (4) click the Create button. Note that you can create as many menus as you want. However, don’t try to test a lot of alternatives if you don’t have much visitors in your site. In this case, it is better to start with just one alternative and see what happens

Edit the Alternative Menu(s)

Editing alternative menus is extremely easy by using the WordPress‘ regular menu editor, with just a few controls, for adding, removing, and restructuring your menus. No need to learn complex tools nor use shortcodes!

Setting up the goals

In order to define and configure which actions should be counted as conversions, on the Goals tab, you may add as many as actions as you want. In our example, we were interested in our visitors come up reading our blog and visiting our Nelio A/B testing website.

Once saved the new menu, the experiment has already been created and it’s already prepared for execution. In the Experiments page, you select the new experiment you’ve created and then click Start to launch it.

Automatically, half of your visitors will see the original Main Menu and the other half the alternative new one. In any other case with more alternatives, the visitors would be segmented in as many groups as different versions of menus you’ve defined.

Now, you have to wait for a while and…find the results of your Menu test.

Please, for more details about understanding the results of your experiment, I recommend the reading of one of my previous posts:  Publishers, Increase the Readers of your Posts! where there is detailed description of how to find the results of a Headline experiment and similarly applies to a Menu experiment.

And… What Happen When the Results are Confident enough?

At some point, when the results of your menu experiment reach a high level of confidence, and if the winner is the original one, just stop the experiment and now you have the certainty that your original menu is the best one (among those tested) for your goals! But if the winner is the alternative one, you may use the Apply button that will overwrite the original menu with the alternative.

And that’s it! Now you have the proof whether you hypothesis based on the evidence of your Menu experiment.

So, if you’re a lover of tasting menus and want to be sure that your menu provides the best overall idea of what you offer and prioritize your goals, you should try the Menu testing with Nelio A/B Testing!