In one of our previous blogs, we provided a guide on how to create and run an A/B test on your website. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we actually ran an A/B test for our expoze.io website. We think it would be exciting and compelling to share with you the design choices and the results of the A/B testing we ran.
As conversion rate optimization (CRO) professionals will know, overall website design through colors, text, button shapes, and layout can significantly change the behavior of visitors.
The aim is to help visitors undertake the actions we want most, like sign ups; who wouldn’t want more customers? So we implemented and tested new design options for over a month and compared them to the designs of the previous month to get a clear and reliable picture of the overall performance.
As we can see, the results show a massive improvement! The blue version saw a 47% increase in click-through rate over the previous green button. Exactly the result we were looking for.
We changed and tested multiple CTA buttons across our website; the blue button consistently scored a higher click-through rate. Results range from an increase of 25% up to a whopping 175%. It is decent progress, now more people are going to the pages we want them to visit.
So for version B, we wanted to create an image that could pique visitors' interests, communicate the topic and create a less static experience. We added:
After a month of testing, we compared the data and the results were crystal clear. Both the click-through rate and the views increased when using version B. The complete results:
We witnessed a significant increase in visual attention on the homepage with version B, from 3,9% to 5,9%. That’s a whopping 51% increase in visual attention!
Interestingly, the added contrast also caused more traffic to the CTA buttons on the homepage. The ‘Get Started’ button on the top-right corner had an increase of 25% in click-through rate even though the button itself did not change.
It allowed us to choose the best version for a new design, which we could then test in a real-world scenario with the A/B test. We placed the two different thumbnails in the context of our webpage and produced a heatmap with areas of interest (AOI) for the thumbnail area. It revealed if the visual attention of visitors would differ. The result can be seen below.
The area of interest clearly shows us that version B with the blue text would attract more visual attention, so that’s the version we ran for the A/B test. Hypothetically, if the website had 1000 visitors a day it would mean that 65 more people see the video thumbnail, a big difference in numbers.
To round off, we hope this blog has informed and perhaps even inspired you about design decisions for a more effective web page design. Maybe you now have ideas you immediately want to test for your own website. Make sure to pre-test your designs with expoze.io to get the best results out of your A/B test.