A/B testing 101: How Small Changes Can Increase Leads

This post comes to us from the WebsiteBox blog:

Websites are a great marketing tool. This fact is well established in the real estate community. However, one of the most underrated and neglected web marketing strategies is A/B testing. Consider this have you ever wondered if minor changes to the content or layout of a website could actually increase the amount of visitors that contact you? Now there is a way to find out if these minor changes actually do make a difference in the amount of leads your website generates. It is A/B testing.

A/B testing may sound like a very technical term. However, it is a very simple concept. It is a way of testing a marketing campaign by having two different versions of a web page compete with each other to see which one is more effective. For example, if you want to see whether "ask me about a listing" will get more inquiries than "contact me for more info," you could run an A/B test with both, measure which one gets you more inquiries via Google Analytics and voila! You will know what tagline you should include in the link to your inquiry form.

It is important to remember that in A/B testing you always want to test which changes increase a particular action. It is not enough to test two different pages against each other to see which one gets the most critical acclaim, but rather you need to focus on the purpose of the page you are testing. What do you want your visitors to do after they visit that page? Once you answer that question, you will be prepared to set up your A/B test.