Lecture 3: A/B testing
Every
software development cycle has got a testing phase. This is very important for
any project to be successful because it is during this phase all unseen and
undiscovered bugs of the software are detected. A/B testing is also very
similar to other types of testing like unit, regression, functional – blackbox or
whitebox testing. The name of this type of testing clearly tells any novice user
that it means to pick from the two choices available A or B.
There
can be various KPIs set for a website and there can be hundreds of metrics used
to measure these KPIs. A/B testing
serves the same purpose of KPIs. It is used to determine the success of a
website by comparing two versions of it along the same metrics. Whichever version
sustains the race wins the battle. Let me further investigate into this topic :
A and B are two versions or designs of a website. Usually A is the existing
website and B is the newly designed one. Businesses do this to test the
effectiveness of the new website. The traffic to the website is split between
the two versions and the performance is measured based on the metrics you have
set. Say you would like to have more people signing up for an event, you can
measure it for the two versions and chose the best of it and promote that
version of the website.
There
are certain usual elements that are being tested using A/B testing: Headlines, Images,
Price, Sign-up forms length. There are free tools available on the internet for
performing this test. Google Website Optimizer is one such tool. You can use
A/B testing to either test one feature (say just the Signup button) or the
entire website.
I
guess Google Website Optimizer tool will be handy and useful for our GOMC
project.
