Boosting Website Conversions Exponentially with A/B Testing

Many designers underestimate the power of A/B testing and its ability to drive UX and boost conversions. Unfortunately, this is because most A/B tests are conducted without the forethought of a testing plan. Yes, it's easy to run an A/B test, but it's not as easy to do it well.

In this article, I’m going to show you a real-life case study where we used A/B testing to boost conversions exponentially. I’ll walk you through the process that we took, mentioning any tools used, and linking to any useful tutorials along the way. I’m Jon from The Good, where we turn visitors into buyers — and that’s exactly what we did for TreeRing. Read on to find out how.

Why A/B Testing Often Fails

First, let’s talk about why A/B testing often fails.

One of the main reasons that A/B testing fails to yield actionable results is the lack of a strategic, iterative testing plan. Many companies instead approach A/B testing in a scattered, shotgun manner, trying a random test here, another there, all without a cohesive and strategic technique. This is like trying to improve on the piano by practicing different instruments every day. You may have occasional, random success, but you won’t make much substantive progress.

The power of A/B testing is unlocked when you develop a step-by-step, robust testing plan with each step providing more insights into what’s going wrong. In other words, the results of the first test inform how you perform the second test. When you use this method, you see compounding results, with each test achieving greater results. Slowly but surely, as they say.

Introducing TreeRing and Their UX Problems

TreeRing helps schools create better yearbooks. Their social-first approach lets teachers, parents, and students capture memories, safely share them with the school community, and create free, personalized pages for the printed edition — all at no extra cost to the school.

They came to us needing help with their website, where the user experience was significantly hampering their growth. They were seeing a low lead-generation conversion rate for their free sample download. Their primary goal was to get visitors to download a free sample yearbook, and they in turn could use these leads to generate sales and retain customers. But their conversion rate was painfully low, generating much fewer leads than desired.

They had tried one-off conversion improvements and had only seen minimal success. They knew that a better process for A/B testing was crucial, but couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and since their organic traffic growth was slowing due to platforms like Google and Facebook shifting toward an emphasis on paid traffic, they wanted to get more conversions from their existing traffic, rather than paying to acquire new traffic.

That being said, they also wanted us to take a detailed look at their website to determine precisely where they should focus their testing strategy. They had implemented various changes in an effort to improve conversion rates and hadn’t seen much success, because they weren't 100% on what they should be focusing on.

We needed to find out which areas of the UI were key, then carry out a conversion rate optimization strategy to begin test variants of these key UI elements.

How A/B Testing Became Part of the Strategy

We began with an initial audit of their site, working to identify the biggest UX dark spots.

We like to approach problems with a "leaky bucket" strategy. If we can find and fix the largest holes first, we’ll see the biggest impact. Once we highlighted the primary issues (which we’ll talk more about in a moment), we began using A/B testing to solve those issues.

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by Jon MacDonald via SitePoint