A/B testing has one downside, but if you’re careful, it won’t hurt your website’s traffic or Google rankings.
Google penalizes duplicate content. When two pieces of identical content are published on your website, Google doesn’t know which one to present in the SERP, so it may not present either one.
This is a problem for any business that wants to generate organic traffic.
Google understands that businesses need
to do A/B testing. As long as you limit your test runs and avoid cloaking (presenting different copy to users and search engines), you should be fine.
You can use the rel=”canonical” tag to tell Google which of your variations to crawl. This should be the URL that your landing page or other marketing asset will eventually live on permanently.
Additionally, when you need to redirect search engines, make sure you use 302 instead of 301. A 301 redirect is permanent and tells Google that you’re keeping the redirect forever. However, 302 redirects are temporary.
If you follow these best practices, you won’t have to worry about hurting your SEO through A/B testing.
Common A/B testing mistakes
Unfortunately, it’s not hard to make mistakes when running your first few A/B tests, especially if you’re using a broader program like Google Analytics . Below are some of the most common mistakes we’ve encountered:
- Ending the test midweek . If you end it midweek, you can’t account rcs database for seasonality, such as when people spend more time shopping online on the weekend.
- Testing too early . If you have no traffic or conversions, there is no point in A/B testing. You need a significant sample size for the test to be relevant.
- Testing the same thing over and over again . Continuous A/B testing is great, but not when you’re testing the same thing. Trust your data and move on.
- Running multiple tests at once . If you can eliminate overlapping traffic, you can run multiple tests. Otherwise, stick to one at a time.
The best A/B testing tools
The best A/B testing tools eliminate as much of the heavy lifting as possible. Automating your tests will give you more time to focus on other marketing activities so you don’t burn out on A/B testing.
Keep in mind, however, that there are many A/B testing tools out there. Many how does it work? feetfinder work? monetization options for sellers of them focus on specific elements that you might want to test.
Hello Bar A/B testing examples
Let’s say you’re interested in A/B testing an offer linked to an email signup form. This is easy enough in the Hello Bar dashboard.
Create a new Hello panel and select “Collect Emails” in the left navigation column.
Option A might look like this:
Create a second Hello panel to collect emails. This time, change one of the variables.
For the purposes of our example, we’ll change the call to action singapore data on the button to look like this:
As you can see, we haven’t changed anything except the CTA. In a future A/B test, we might want to test the offer. If we leave Variant A the same, Variant B could look like this:
We have changed the wording of the offer here.