A/B Testing: Creatives, Ad Copy, Landing Pages, Lead Gen Forms
Effective marketing takes a lot of time and money. In 2019, American companies spent about $15.2 billion on marketing. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t see the returns that they would like. Who wants to dedicate thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to marketing projects that don’t motivate target audiences?
If you aren’t getting the results you expect, you may find that A/B testing can dramatically improve your outreach and conversions. You can apply A/B testing to practically any aspect of your advertising and marketing approach, including ad copy, landing pages, and lead generation forms.
Before getting into the details of how you can benefit from A/B testing, let’s take an overview to see how it works.
What Is A/B testing in digital marketing?
A/B testing is a strategic approach that helps you identify your most effective approaches to marketing. At the most basic level, you release two advertisements. Then, you track which one performs better. The one that brings you more ROI gets preference over the one that under-performs. Why keep spending money on an ad that doesn’t convert consumers into customers?
A/B testing can get more complex. For instance, it can include more than two pieces of content. You can release as many as you want, but a larger campaign will cost more money.
You can also use ongoing A/B testing campaigns to keep improving your campaigns. When your research finds that ad A outperforms ad B, you can turn your attention to ad A’s details. You may find a few ways to improve ad A. If the revised version performs better, then you can replace the original. Then, you can continue optimizing your content with new versions. It’s an ongoing process that should lead to more audience engagement and increased sales.
How do you perform an A/B test?
You can A/B test every part of your ad campaign, including videos, images, ad copy, landing pages, calls-to-action (CTA), and lead generation forms.
It often makes sense to introduce advertisements with subtle differences. Over time, you will learn a lot about how your target audience responds to certain aesthetics and messages.
Now that you have a good overview of A/B testing, let’s take a deeper dive into five areas that can help your business thrive.
How to A/B test ad creatives
Despite having so many options in the “creative” category, it’s one of the easier items to A/B test. Many A/B tests involve:
Adding a CTA click button to an image versus using an un-clickable version.
Putting your company logo next to images versus leaving the logo off.
Using different color schemes to determine which one your audience finds most attractive.
Many companies assume that custom illustrations and photos will get the best results. That’s not always the case. Custom imagery sounds like the obvious choice, but it can cost a lot of money and get underwhelming results.
You can get free stock and illustration images from websites like: