5 Things to A/B Test on Your Magento Product Page

Getting this far in the online market means you must have mastered at least the basics of online marketing strategies to boost your conversions. You have heard about, and most probably tried, most of these strategies yourself. So now, let’s talk about one of the famous tools for conversion optimization – A/B testing.

A/B testing, as the name implies, is a mechanism used to create more than one version on a page with the purpose of knowing which approach appeals more to your Magento visitor and ultimately yields higher sales. Now allow us to take these strategies further than knowing how to use them by learning when and what we should be using them for. In this article, let us begin with this widely used A/B testing method.

AB Testing

Handy tool for conversion optimization – A/B testing

1. Headline

Headline, also known as product title, is, without a doubt, one of the most vital content to sell your page. Since it is the first words they read before finally checking on the product, a careful consideration of what actually attracts your visitors is of your top priority. In here lies the first step to a successful conversion.

Points to consider:
Keywords -- choose from among the two best short and simple product title.
Example: “Japanese Crash Course -- 20 hours” vs. “20-hour JLPT Package”

Each sample title bears its own unique appeal depending on the kind of visitors you get. For people with barely even a knowledge of the Japanese culture, common tourists per se, the first option is bound to get their clicks. However, for those that came to your page with an intention of learning the language for specific purposes, the first option may appear too simple, even giving them a sense of doubt on your company’s teaching capacity. These are the ones with an already basic knowledge of the Japanese culture and might even know a few words. They definitely know what JLPT stands for. What they need is a professional assistance to gain control of the language. Hence, a more technical approach is bound to earn their confidence in your program.

Font styles and sizes -- remember: visual presentation of your headline is as important as the words you use.

So here’s the point: A/B testing your headlines can give you an insight of your market demographic. This bears the benefit of a better market control not only on your current headlines, but also on your choices of product offers in the future.

2. Image

Visual presentations has been a long-standing variable for market conversions. In many instances, images bait the clicks even before the visitor has actually read the product title. Learn the best visual marketing approach for your Magento store visitors by trying different variants until you find out which garners more traffic.

Product Images in Techzone vs Craft themes

Product Images in Techzone vs Craft themes

Points to consider:

  • Should you use an illustration of the product or the actual product photo instead?
  • Should you show only the product image itself, or the product with other participating items for more representations?
  • Will the use of image filters and other effects encourage visitor engagements?
  • Will a video thumbnail be more appropriate for your product than a regular image?
  • Will product quantity in the image garner a significant increase of visitors’ traffic on your page? Or is it better to stick to single product image?

3. Badge

Another effective way to draw visitors’ attention to your product is by adding badges on your default images. These are the small stickers attached to your product image with a one-word caption describing your products’ selling status. Consider them as banners in a department store that attracts shoppers to check on an item.

Hot Sales Badge

Hot Sales Badge

Points to consider:

    • Badge design (color, fonts, sizes, style)
    • Selling status (such as sale badges) or Product availability information (such as “limited offer” notifications)

4. Description

A good online merchant should never fail to give attention on his product descriptions. For most visitors, what they read on the description can be the ultimate deciding factor whether or not they add your item to their cart or not. Hence, a careful and thorough description is necessary for your conversion.

Points to consider:

  • Would catchy marketing approach be appropriate for your product?
  • Will customer reviews and other forms of showcasing customer insight yield better sales?
  • Detailed or brief? Make one for each and see which get more conversions.
  • Is adding tables and graphs better than plain text description?

Here is an unnegotiable pointer, though: keep your contents original. Among the millions of things Google is good at, kicking websites down the SEO ranking due to duplicate content and content scraping is one of those. So remember, always create unique content on all your description page versions.

5. Check-out process

It has been a long-standing ideology that the reduction of page loads and steps visitors have to go through will surely increase conversions. While this has remained undebatable, customer preference still varies on how long a “simple” check-out process should be.

Here is a quick preview of the A/B tests done by two successful e-commerce companies we could learn from. While Elastic Path was working the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store, a challenge was created when they ventured a single-page checkout process that still contained everything they have in their normal multiple-step checkout. With split testing of 50% traffic directed to each version, the winner was clear was after 300 transactions. Google web optimizer concluded that the single-page checkout outperformed the multiple-step checkout by 21.8%.

Multiple step Checkout Page:

Multiple Steps Checkout

Multiple Steps Checkout

Single-page checkout:

Single Step Checkout

Single Step Checkout

While the result is evident, this should not be mistaken as an indicator for all single-page checkout performances. Neil Patel, a co-founder of Crazy Egg reveals a rather contrasting result on his A/B test after accepting the challenge by Conversion Rate Experts. Between Crazy Eggs already existing simple two-page checkout process and a 3-page checkout variable, the contending 3-page checkout process garnered 10% increase in conversions after a total of 817 conversions.

Conclusion

Just because most of your competitors yield better results in applying common page-design strategies doesn’t mean you will. One of the major mistakes an e-commerce could encounter is being dead sure of the tiniest detail even before testing them. Remember, if you are not testing, you are just guessing. And the trouble comes when you don’t really know what works. Ultimately, this A/B testing tool won’t do your online store much good if you fail at discerning just exactly what needs to be strategized in the first place. Stay tune for more tips on usage enhancement for your Magento tools. And lastly, tell us what you think of these tips on the comment box below!

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