You may have heard the old adage, “A website is never done.” Even the best digital platforms go through multiple rounds of changes, updates, and a complete overhaul now and then. Because even if your platform is already good, there’s always something you can do to improve the user experience and better support your business goals.

The key is figuring out which changes truly result in improvements, and which are a waste of your money and time.

Why You Need A/B Testing

Here are a few use cases where A/B testing can deliver crucial info:

Whatever the business case, you must understand how users interact with your platform and how its features impact their experience, in order to make informed decisions about platform design and content.

Too often, companies evaluate changes with internal stakeholders instead of real users. In the end, you may go through a lot of development work without knowing if the changes you’re making will result in something impactful. Instead, with less time and fewer resources, __you can use A/B testing with your actual audience to find out definitively what’s effective and what’s not. __

How A/B Testing Helps Your Platform

In addition to helping maximize the effectiveness and minimize the resources invested in platform redesign, A/B testing provides invaluable short- and long-term benefits:

Increase Conversions

Probably the number-one goal for most redesign efforts, increasing conversion rate is one of the most robust uses of A/B testing. Rather than guessing at what makes users complete a registration form or take a desired action, you get hard data to confirm whether a change truly produces a lift in conversions.

Improve User Engagement & Retention

Bounce rate is often a key indicator of user experience and can have a significant impact on your conversion goals. Testing multiple elements of a particular page can help you find visitor pain points and improve their overall experience, ultimately getting them to spend more time on your site.

Learn About Your Audience

By progressively testing which elements your users gravitate to (or from), you can learn a little more about your audience at each step, and then use that data to inform future design and content.

Road-Test New Features

Before you introduce a new feature, launching it as an A/B test can show how your audience is likely to react. You’ll get hard and fast data in a real-world environment with less risk.

Personalize User Experiences

You can use A/B testing as a way to identify steps toward platform personalization, to understand which forms of personalization could potentially increase user engagement.

What Should You Test?

A/B testing can be used for everything from full page designs to single content elements. Even small and simple changes can significantly impact the user experience and, consequently, your engagement and conversion rates.

When Humana A/B tested a website banner, the version with pared-down copy and a different photo increased click-throughs by 433 percent! In a second test, changing the call-to-action (CTA) copy increased click-throughs by a further 192 percent, showing that even subtle word changes can boost engagement.

How do you figure out what to test? Examining quantitative or qualitative data will help you identify potential pain points and give you a basis for experimentation. Maybe your homepage has an unusually high bounce rate, or users are providing negative feedback on your sign up process. Once you’ve identified an issue, form a hypothesis to test: define a problem, propose a solution, and identify metrics for success or failure.

Whatever you include in your testing plan, focus on things that are most likely to impact the metric you’re trying to improve. For instance, if you want to increase conversion rate, you might test the design or placement of a CTA.

Here are some commonly tested elements:

One caution: if you’re testing multiple elements simultaneously, make sure they’re distinct enough that they don’t affect each other and impact the results of each test. Your results should be related only to the options you’re presenting, so there’s a clear understanding of what exactly is influencing your audience.

One Last Word of Advice

In the end, one form of testing alone is never a panacea for improving your platform. While A/B testing provides valuable data, it has limitations, too. Most importantly, unlike qualitative analysis, it doesn’t explain the why behind your measured results. Also, the data produced is only relevant to the specific area you’re testing, versus open-ended user testing that could surface other challenges hindering your platform’s performance.

That’s why qualitative feedback is still vitally important for your site — it surfaces things you can’t learn from numbers alone (like a user not finding you trustworthy or credible). A/B testing can give you relatively quick and easy ways to improve your user experience, but it doesn’t give you every answer you need.

Your business never stands still, and your audience is always evolving and changing. We’re here to help you keep looking forward. Contact us today to talk about optimizing your platform experience.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. It’s true for your business, and it’s true for your digital platform. Yet we’ve seen organizations from startups to enterprises neglect to incorporate measurement into their platform strategy.

Data shows you what is and isn’t working in your platform. And, unlike most websites, platforms provide detailed information about known users across specific touchpoints — accurate, first-party data that doesn’t rely on cookies or fuzzy analytics. Actionable insights await; you just have to know what you’re measuring for.

Here’s how to take a strategic approach to measuring platform performance.

Start From the Top

Measuring the success of your platform involves the same general principles used in strategic planning. Start from the top and work your way down:

Once you define your platform’s core purpose, you can identify which metrics to track. Just make sure that if you move the needle on those metrics, you’re truly moving the needle for your business.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you run a healthcare system whose primary goal is to save lives. To meet that goal, your employees need speedy access to your procedures for patient care. So, you build an intranet platform in order to provide the fastest possible access to that critical information. Your core purpose is to make sure this information is as easy to find as possible, so employees have critical information at critical moments.

What Should You Measure?

You’ve identified your platform’s core purpose. Next question is, what is the core interaction your platform relies on to achieve that purpose? What’s the single most important thing you need users to do? That action determines how you define an “active” platform user, and it’s the key driver for what you should measure.

Just like with social media, where the term “monthly active users” is widely used but has many different meanings, business platforms often have unique definitions of an active user. A company intranet focused on employee engagement might define an active user as someone who posts content a certain number of times per month. A business platform offering exclusive deals to attract new customers might define an active user as a customer who redeems at least one deal per year.

Whatever your platform’s purpose is, you need to be tracking metrics related to your definition of an active user, in order to optimize the core interaction that drives your business goals.

Examples of Useful Metrics

Before we dive into the list, there’s a caveat: Just because you can measure a ton of metrics doesn’t mean you should. Too much data can be distracting, and paying attention to too many metrics can create confusion and cause analysis paralysis. The goal of measurement isn’t to manage a dashboard; it’s to make decisions and take actions that drive positive business outcomes.

Choose a primary goal, define a core objective and active user, and aim for up to five core metrics to measure success. Here are some examples:

Growth

If your business goals depend on having a large number of platform users, you might use one of the following growth measures:

Reach

This is useful for platforms where you’re looking to engage a certain proportion of a population, such as your employees or your customer base. You might track:

Engagement

Engagement covers a lot of ground, and it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Focus on the metrics that tell you how people are responding to your efforts to engage them at various touchpoints. Here are some examples:

Begin at the Beginning

It’s a mistake to think about measurement only after you’ve built your platform. Remember, platform measurement isn’t as easy as dropping in base Google Analytics code. Platform metrics are deep and nuanced, so you need to think strategically from the start. Plan the key metrics up front, and incorporate measurement into your platform roadmap from the beginning.

Your game plan, in a nutshell:

  1. Decide what to measure
  2. Implement tracking capabilities
  3. Measure platform performance
  4. Analyze the results and find actionable insights
  5. Make decisions: what’s working, and what needs to change?

Establishing measurement practices early on enables you to continually track, analyze, and optimize performance over the life of your platform. Already launched? Fear not. It’s never too late to implement measurement techniques to optimize platform performance.

If you’re thinking about how to be more strategic with platform measurement, we’d love to help. Feel free to reach out with any questions you have.