How to Setup Profitable A/B Tests for Success of PPC Campaign?

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It's easy for marketers like us to rely on our gut feelings to tell us what will compel readers to click on a landing page, send out an email, or generate call-to-action buttons.

How to Setup Profitable A/B Tests for Success of PPC Campaign?

It's easy for marketers like us to rely on our gut feelings to tell us what will compel readers to click on a landing page, send out an email, or generate call-to-action buttons.

However, as any marketer worth their salt will tell you, you should always prepare for the unexpected. Therefore, you would be far better off doing an A/B test to evaluate what the data says about marketing decisions rather than basing them on a "feeling."

To ensure that you can make the best decisions possible based on your findings, continue reading to learn how to carry out the complete A/B testing process before to, during, and following data gathering.

A/B Testing's Past

It's challenging to determine the "real" history of A/B testing. But American novelist and advertiser Claude Hopkins is credited with popularising A/B testing in marketing, although in its crude early version. Hopkins used promotional coupons to test his advertising tactics.

Nevertheless, the fundamental ideas behind modern A/B testing were absent from Hopkins' "Scientific Advertising" methodology. For those, we may thank Ronald Fisher, a biologist from the 20th century. Fisher contributed to the improvement of A/B testing reliability by defining statistical significance and creating the null hypothesis.

Nonetheless, the 1960s and 1970s saw the beginning of the marketing A/B testing that we are familiar with today. Methods for direct response campaigns were also tested using it.

What makes A/B testing crucial?

Depending on what you choose to test, A/B testing can provide a marketing team with a number of advantages. You may test an infinite number of things, for instance, to find out how they will affect your bottom line overall. However, don't discount the importance of employing A/B testing to determine precisely what your target audience reacts to. Let's investigate further.

There Are Ways For You To Increase Your Profits

Assume for the moment that you pay a content creator $50,000 a year. For the company blog, this content writer writes five pieces a week, for a yearly total of 260 articles.

If a company's blog post creates 10 leads on average, you could say that it costs the business little over $192 to get 10 leads ($50,000 salary ÷ 260 articles = $192 per piece). That's a significant amount of change.

Now, since you're releasing fewer articles, you might lose $192 if you ask this content writer to spend two days creating an A/B test on one piece rather than generating two posts in that time.

You can ascertain what appeals to your target audience.

Because distinct audiences behave, well, differently, A/B testing can be useful. It's possible that something that functions well for one business won't for another.

Take, for instance, an uncommon B2B marketing strategy. Last week, I was searching through HubSpot's 2024 Industry Trends Report data for a piece. 10% of B2B marketers that I observed intended to reduce their NFT investment as part of their 2024 strategy.

My initial reaction was, "Huh, NFTs in B2B?"

Then it dawned on me. B2B marketers had to have been employing NFTs in the first place for there to be a drop. What was even more unexpected was the finding that 34% of marketers intend to boost NFT spending as part of their

Experts in conversion rate optimisation (CRO) despise the term "best practices" for reasons like this. For the reason that "best practice"? It might not be the greatest practice for you after all.

However, if you're not careful, this type of testing might become complicated. So let's go over how A/B testing functions to make sure you don't assume the wrong thing about what your audience finds appealing.

How are A/B tests conducted?

You must make two distinct versions of the same piece of material, each with a single variable changed, in order to conduct an A/B test.

After that, you'll present these two versions to two audiences of comparable sizes and compare their respective performances over a given time frame. However, bear in mind that the testing duration ought to be sufficient to draw reliable conclusions about your findings.

Marketers may see how one version of a piece of marketing material performs in comparison to another by using A/B testing. Here are two A/B test types that you may run to improve the conversion rate of your website.

Example 1: Test of User Experience

Maybe you would like to test whether increasing the click-through rate of a specific call-to-action (CTA) button by placing it to the top of your homepage rather than in the sidebar.

You would make another, different website that makes advantage of the new CTA positioning in order to A/B test this notion.

Version A is the current layout that features the sidebar CTA as the "control." Version B is the "challenger," with the call to action at the top. Next, you would expose each of these two versions to a pre-assigned percentage of site visitors in order to test them.

It is ideal for the same proportion of visitors to view both versions.

Example 2: Evaluation of Design

Maybe you'd like to see if your CTA button's click-through rate may be raised by changing its colour.

You would create a backup CTA button with a different button colour that points to the same landing page as the control in order to A/B test this notion.

Should your A/B test reveal that the green variant of your CTA button receives more clicks than the red one, you might want to consider making the green option the default colour of your CTA buttons going forward.