A/B Testing for Better Results: Why Your Testing Tool Matters
In recent times, some have argued that all A/B testing software is pretty much the same.
The argument goes like this:
All A/B testing solutions are built to perform the same function. They have roughly the same set of features and are roughly the same in terms of performance. So, if you’re a marketer or engineer embarking on a program of testing, the way to decide what testing tool to use is this:
- Make a list of required capabilities
- Find the testing platforms that have the capabilities you need
- Buy the cheapest option
We want to argue that it would be a mistake for businesses to adopt this approach.
There are three main reasons for this:
- Different platforms have different levels of performance. Just because a platform says it does something, that does not necessarily mean it does it well. Different architectures and set-ups produce different results.
- Enterprise A/B testing solutions are superior. Choosing an enterprise testing solution means you get a much broader set of testing and analytics capabilities than you would with a simple A/B testing tool. Your testing is in the service of creating a more attractive, higher-converting customer experience. Having your A/B testing sit alongside other capabilities lets you do this much more easily.
- Professional services add real value. Even amongst enterprise solutions, there are differences. One main difference is the availability of professional services from the testing tool vendor. Opting for a solution that comes with in-house expert advice and additional services means you get access to a wealth of experience that you wouldn’t get with a bargain-basement tool.
The advantages of enterprise-level testing capabilities
An enterprise-grade solution provides long-term value and strategic advantage. So, if you choose your A/B testing options based solely on price, you’ll miss out.
You won’t have the functionality that will allow you to personalize your customer experiences at scale or drive the significant improvements in conversion rates and revenue that enable growth.
There are several things that set enterprise solutions apart:
Segmentation
Enterprise-grade solutions offer advanced targeting and segmentation allowing you to tailor your tests to very specific audiences. This level of granularity is essential for understanding different customer behaviors and preferences, which can significantly impact the effectiveness of A/B tests.
Integration
If you have a mature tech stack with several pieces of software working together, you’ll need a testing platform that can integrate seamlessly, allowing data to flow freely and providing you with insights that are actionable across your entire marketing ecosystem.
Scalability
A growing business means higher data volumes and increases in traffic. Enterprise platforms are built to handle large volumes of data and traffic without compromising performance. This scalability means you can get more ambitious with your A/B testing as your business grows. What’s more, the reliability of enterprise platforms means that you can trust them to be performant even under heavy loads, which is crucial for maintaining user experience and collecting accurate data.
Security
Enterprise A/B testing platforms are designed with the data security requirements of large online businesses in mind. They offer solid security features and comply with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. This protects you and your customers and avoids potential legal and financial penalties.
Support
Advanced testing solutions come with a higher level of customer support. Access to experts who can provide guidance on best practices, help troubleshoot issues, and ensure that the platform is aligned with the business’s goals means you can generate a lot more value from your A/B testing.
Some enterprise vendors outsource their professional services to an outside agency. Monetate, however, provides dedicated, in-house support. This support is invaluable for setting up the testing tool to perform optimally during onboarding and maximizing ROI.
Deeper insights
The insights provided by enterprise-grade platforms are more illuminating than the results you get from a simple A/B testing tool. They offer comprehensive analytics and reporting features that support more informed decision-making and produce more deeply personalized experiences.
A/B testing as part of the bigger picture
A/B testing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It sits alongside other forms of testing and personalization, including product recommendations, dynamic bundles, social proof, product finders, personalized search, and more. Together, the aim is to produce outstanding customer experience, boost value, and forge deep customer relationships.
When that’s your ambition, you need enterprise software to make it work.
Some online businesses try to cobble together all the elements they need themselves to create their desired personalization and customer experience. In doing so, they may save on some costs, but the payoff is an unwieldy infrastructure that doesn’t perform as they hope or deliver the results they need.
If you want to go the in-house route, you’ll need to allocate considerable engineering and developer resources so you can implement testing across your entire customer journey. The most advanced testing platforms provide a pre-built dashboard where you can oversee all your tests, in addition to expert help from people who’ve done similar implementations many times before.
Differentiator: Feature flags
One differentiator of the Monetate platform is feature flags, a component part of A/B testing. They allow you to develop and deploy a feature safely by serving it to a smaller percentage of your audience than if you were doing a big-bang launch.
If you wanted to test features in this way without an enterprise-level testing tool that comes with feature flags, you’d have to build that functionality yourself (a big job) or buy a point solution and make sure it’s integrated correctly with the rest of your tech stack (not as much work as building your own but still a considerable challenge.)
Server-side and client-side testing capabilities
Not all tools offer client-side and server-side testing so look for a solution that offers both. Integrated client and server-side testing allows marketing and developer teams to work together.
Marketers don’t have the same technical expertise as developers but need to find out if their ideas resonate with customers. They can do this with easy-to-understand and use client-side testing.
Developer teams, meanwhile, get freed up to work on testing that can only be done server-side.
With Monetate, you get the performance of a server-side test and the agility and usability of client-side testing.
The model for client and server-side testing is this:
- Use the client-side testing as proof of concept, with the feature you’re testing either put directly into a dev. queue or tested more extensively on the server side.
- Test client-side with a light footprint and then, if the results of the test provide a demonstrable uplift, migrate server-side.
- You’ll need to allocate developer resources at this point, but you’ll remove any possibility that something on the client side (browser differences, device variability, JavaScript execution, user settings, etc.,) could be affecting your results.
With this model, you get the buy-in from your developer team who build the code you’ll need to run the test.
To achieve great personalization, you need both sides of the equation: marketers who have a great understanding of the customer and developers who know how to thoroughly test hypotheses and realize that understanding in the user experience.
Remember, testing isn’t an end in itself. You’re testing so you can see what the customer likes best and offer more deeply personalized, relevant experiences to more groups of people.
So, setting up marketers and developers to work together, with their insights feeding into each other, is important not just for the success of your testing but for the overall customer experience you can provide.
Differentiator: The client-side tag
Client-side testing works through the deployment of a tag that’s connected to a JavaScript library of testing tools. The size, weight, and efficiency of this library is important for your site’s performance. A bloated library full of inefficiently written code will slow your site down. Monetate has an industry-leading tag that has minimal impact on site performance.
Testing product recommendations server-side
Product recommendations use sophisticated algorithms to analyze customer behavior, preferences, and historical data to generate personalized suggestions. Recommendations need to be relevant and delivered quickly: an intensive process requiring substantial processing power.
This means you need a high level of performance when testing to evaluate the effectiveness of different recommendation algorithms or changes in recommendation logic.
To get this performance, you need to use a testing tool that can handle large amounts of data and deliver consistent results. If you’re not able to access server-side testing when running recommendation experiments, you won’t get the full picture and your customer experience will suffer.
Server-side testing of recommendations lets you:
- Make decisions in real-time: For product recommendations to be effective, they need to be generated and displayed in real-time as users browse a website. This demands a high-performance backend to minimize latency and ensure a seamless user experience. Delays in loading recommendations make customers frustrated and hurt engagement.
- Handle large volumes of data: Product recommendations typically deal with large datasets, including user profiles, product catalogs, and interaction logs. To process and analyze this data in real time, you need an infrastructure capable of handling large volumes of data and providing instant recommendations to customers.
- Scale with reliable results: Testing environments need to simulate real-world conditions to validate the scalability of the recommendation system under peak loads. Higher performance means you can stress-test and confidently scale up to meet demand without compromising on speed or accuracy.
- Provide a consistent customer experience: The performance of your product recommendations directly impacts the customer experience. Slow or inaccurate recommendations can detract from CX, leading to lower conversion rates and a drop-off in engagement.
Professional services – a key differentiator
Monetate is able to offer comprehensive and hands-on support services as a standard part of our testing package. We do all the onboarding ourselves so you can benefit from our in-house expertise built up over many years of work on a huge range of implementations.
Neither Optimizely, DynamicYield nor Adobe have a consultancy in-house that can offer a comparable service.
Most enterprise vendors farm out professional services to an agency (who may or may not have expertise in dealing with your specific architecture.) So even compared to the enterprise players, we stand out.
If you have a poor-performing testing tool — with flicker on the site or slow loading speeds, for example — you create low-quality results and create a weak customer experience that directly impacts revenue.
One thing that sets Monetate apart is our ability to implement features such as product recommendations, social proof, personalized search, testing, and more with one tag or one server-side integration. This is key as more tags results in a bigger hit on site performance and page load times.
We consider professional services as a core part of our offering because, even supposing that all A/B tools are built equally, they won’t perform equally well if they’re not implemented correctly. That’s why we take great care during onboarding to optimize your A/B testing setup.
A few more things every brand needs from a testing tool
In addition to the capabilities we’ve already discussed, there are some other features you should look for when deciding what A/B testing solution to use:
A powerful statistics engine
A statistics engine tells you if the change you’ve made has had a statistically significant impact. Monetate provides a statistics engine as an inbuilt part of the platform. It will also tell you how long you’ll have to run the test until you get statistically significant results.
An API integration
We have an API integration that captures standard eCommerce metrics. The results of your tests are pulled into your site so you can see at a glance the impact they’re having. It means you don’t have to set up a new analytics dashboard for your testing.
Monetate’s API integration ingests a product feed. This is what gives us the foundation for analytics, personalization based on user behavior, social proof messaging, product recommendations, and bundles. All of these features work within one integration, so it is easy for clients to choose additional capabilities from Monetate. Building out additional personalization experiences is easy without additional integrations, making the time to value quicker for merchandisers and brands.
Omnichannel tracking
Monetate’s Customer View feature captures a unique customer ID, typically applied when a customer does a particular behavior. If the customer does that behavior again on a different device, we can recognize them, follow them across sessions and devices, and keep them in the same variant. It means we can deliver consistent experiences and valid testing in an omnichannel environment.
Delivering personalized experiences through precision testing
Personalization is most effective when it sits alongside an enterprise A/B testing tool. Without this, you have no way of knowing how effective your personalization initiatives are.
While a superficial comparison of your options might lead you to prioritize cost over quality, this approach overlooks the deeper, more strategic benefits that enterprise solutions like Monetate offer.
Enterprise platforms differentiate themselves through superior performance, advanced segmentation, seamless integration, scalability, and enhanced security. These features elevate the quality of A/B testing, and at the same time offer high-quality personalization and customer experience capabilities.
However, not all enterprise solutions are created equal. Monetate’s commitment to professional services, our ability to facilitate server-side and client-side testing, and our best-in-class testing capabilities mean we’re the standout choice for developers and marketers who need to deliver world-beating personalization and unique digital experiences.