You won’t know how well your online marketing campaigns are performing unless you review the data that you’ve spent so much time and effort collecting. One of the best ways to use your data to increase sales and conversions is to implement A/B testing, which is an easy, effective way of analyzing how users see your site. Check out a few tips on how to formulate this type of testing with your own data.

Start by assessing the user experience

• Make sure it’s relevant. Your visitors have certain expectations when they view your page, and it’s important to align your content with them.
• Always be clear. You want to make the content as simple and straightforward as possible, without any extraneous material that might confuse your visitors.
• Communicate value: Give your page visitors a reason to be there and inspire them to stay. Offer information they need, help them solve problems or provide something else of value to them.
• Steer clear of friction: When you view your site, assess whether there’s anything on it that causes confusion or doubt. Avoid presenting content that gives visitors a reason to hesitate.
• Eliminate clutter: Too much content in the form of images or long blocks of text can be distracting, taking away from your message. Get rid of clutter for a cleaner presentation.

Conduct testing across different browsers and devices: Your prospects aren’t using the same browsers, versions, devices or operating systems. You’ll never get an accurate, across the board picture of what your page’s user experience unless you conduct A/B testing wherever and however your target audience is accessing it.

Check your website loading speed: Your potential customers have a short attention span, so they’re not going to stick around for a slow loading page. The rules of thumb are:

• Loads within three seconds: You’re good to go.
• Loads within seven seconds: You’ve got some work to do.
• Loads take seven seconds or longer: You need to improve.

Assess user behavior: There are a few ways you can see what people are doing when they visit your site. Mouse tracking will tell you what visitors are clicking on, while heat maps offer a visualization to aggregate where they’re focusing their attention. You can also implement scroll mapping technology to give you insight on how far visitors scroll down your page.

Take a survey: Probably the most obvious type of A/B testing is to get opinions about your page’s user experience straight from the horse’s mouth. Offer visitors the opportunity to weigh in with their thoughts by survey, so you can establish where you need to improve.

A/B testing can tell you a lot about your online marketing efforts, but it’s important that you go about it the right way. It does involve some trial and error, but the results of A/B testing are extremely useful for measuring site performance; the presentation of your site, in turn, drives traffic, generates leads and increases conversions.