What is A/B testing?

It goes too far to give a total overview of what A/B testing is. There are some great resource out there that can inspire you and can go in real depth what A/B testing is.

For now we will stick with this explaination: A/B testing is a methodical way of testing (and hopefully improving) your website. By serving two or more versions of a webpage, contentblock or website to different visitors results can be gathered which version is performing better for a specific conversion goal.

Why should you A/B test your website?

Your website is always underperforming its potential. Your website will never have a conversion rate of 100% (all visitors do exactly what you want them to do) and probably not even near that conversion rate. By testing specific parts of your website you can experiment and hopefully increase your conversion rate. The internet gives you the ability to test with different variants of your website and see what happens.

A/B Testing in Umbraco

There are already a lot of great A/B testing tooling out there (Google Experiments, Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer). They do a really great job on A/B testing but they all lack a key feature that the uMarketingSuite has; the uMarketingSuite is fully integrated within Umbraco. This allows you to integrate A/B testing in your daily workflow instead of an add-on on top of your cms. This means:

You can A/B test your content in exactly the same and userfriendly way that Umbraco does. This will enable you and your editors to start A/B testing really easy.
The A/B test is rendered automatically without any additional line of code. This means that you don't have to reserve time to "implement A/B testing". It is just there and you can start immediately start testing. Also that means there is no content flickering like in many other tools (just for fun... Google for "A/B Testing flickering"...)
You can use all the resources that Umbraco gives you. You can reuse images of the media library, you can pick contentblock as you are used, and you do not have to worry about changing url's while doing a test.
Within Umbraco you will see that A/B tests are running, so your fellow editors are aware of this and will not ruin your experiments
Because we use first-party analytics and cookies you will track data across all your visitors and not only on a subset of customers which do not have any ad- and cookieblock tooling
Our A/B test is context aware and will make sure that the A/B test is render everywhere correctly. For example; if you are testing a catchy product title it will automatically not render only that new title on the page itself, but also on your overview, your homepage, your shopping cart or at any other place you're using the title. This is impossible with any other tool!

Some great resources

There are a lot of books out there that do a great job explaining the importance of A/B testing and why you should start testing your website today. A short list of the books that inspired us:

Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen. A/B Testing. The most powerful way to turn clicks into customers. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013. Print
Chris Goward. You should test that! Indianapolis, Indiana: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013. Print
Will Kurt. Bayesian statistics the fun way. San Fransisco, William Pollock, 2019. Print