A/B testing is a great way to understand the taste of your audience by comparing two or more versions of your website, web page elements, paid advertisements, newsletters, or any other variable.
It is perhaps the best way to find out which content works better for which set of audience, and that helps you increase user engagement, successful conversions, and decrease bounce rates.
Moreover, A/B testing results are self-sufficient and provide a clear answer to your primary goal. Yes, from the results of A/B testing, it is quite easy to understand which version of your variable worked better for your audience based on the numbers.
Yet some questions remain unanswered.
How can you understand which one of your variables did better? How can you get a deeper insight about the entire performance of your campaign?
Well, for that you need to track secondary goals through Google Analytics. Let’s find out how.
A/B Testing: Secondary Goals
Before getting started with the secondary goals, let’s first get a better understanding of the primary goal of A/B testing.
Speaking of primary goal, the main objective of A/B testing is the primary goal. Yes, it is simply the main thing that you are aiming at while performing an A/B testing.
While performing A/B testing, the usual primary goal happens to be getting a higher conversion rate. Yes, suppose, you are an SEO trainer, and you are giving out free newsletters to your target audience in order to make them sign up so that they can avail that comprehensive guide which your newsletter contains.
Here, if you are running A/B testing with your ad campaign with two or more variables of the same, then your primary goal is to get high number of signups.
But, when it is about the secondary goals, they help you gain a better insight into how your users interact with your website as well as their behavior.
Secondary goals of A/B testing are about gaining more detailed insights regarding your A/B testing results so that you can reach your primary goal easily.
Going back to the previous example, running A/B testing with your signup campaign, you would also want to know which of your content got more signups or at least which one of the variables got more interactions from your potential buyers.
This information will help you get a better understanding about which of your variable content performed better.
So, it is quite clear that tracking both the goals is equally important to increase your conversions and improve the revenue on investment of your business as there is no gain in getting half the data.
Now, let’s find out what secondary goals should you track to get the most out of your A/B testing.
Track These Secondary Goals Through
Google Analytics to Better Understand Your A/B Testing Results
Here are the seven GA events that can really help you better your A/B testing game and get detailed insights for better conversions. Check them out.
Add-To-Cart Metric
When you start tracking the “add-to-cart” actions performed by your audience it will give you a better idea about the frequency of customers adding items to their carts and which of your pages have performed the best.
Tracking this metric, you get the chance to segregate your audience into two different categories. These are:
- People who have added items to their carts but then left the page before completing the transaction. This is also known as shopping cart abandonment
- People who went through a product page but didn’t add the particular item to their cart
You can easily track this metric through Google Task Manager. You will get all the instructions regarding performing the same through Google Analytics.
Once you have started tracking the “add-to-cart” metric, you can get started with performing A/B testing.
You can also try out experiments like, offering discounts to find out if more people are proceeding towards checking out and making a successful transaction with the discounted product.
Rage Clicking
A good lot of people out there have no idea about what rage clicking is. Well, if you are one of them then let us tell you that rage clicking is the phenomenon when a person keeps on clicking on a particular page element however nothing really happens.
This kind of action mostly takes place when users think of a particular element on your webpage to be clickable, although it is not. This might happen for several reasons like a link on your website is not working or maybe that item looks like a button but isn’t.
You can easily find out more about rage clicking with Google Analytics. You will get to know if one of your webpages is getting too many rages clicks or if there is a particular element on your website, say suppose a button, a text, or an image, that is getting rage clicked a lot.
Rage clicking is not a good signal for your business as it can increase bounce rates of your website. Yes, it can frustrate your audience to a level when they start losing trust on your business and decide to leave your website and never come back.
This will result as extremely harmful for your business. So, tracking this particular event is extremely important.
Also, there are occurrences when an element on your page looks like it is clickable, however, is not, as we have mentioned earlier. Such items also receive rage clicks. You can also find out such elements through heatmaps.
Such elements should be removed immediately as they are causing distraction for your website visitors.
You can easily track rage clicks in Google Analytics though GTM (Google Tag Manager) by putting the right tags into that particular HTML code which you want to track.
Newsletter Signups
One of the best ways to increase your reach and providing your subscribers with high-quality, comprehensive, and informative content.
But, before you get to do that, you need to have people who have subscribed to your newsletters. And, obviously, that is not so easy a task.
If you do not have a good number of subscribers for your newsletter, then you can try out running A/B testing with a few variables.
For instance, you can try out variations with the placement of your newsletter. There are a good lot of people who are more likely to subscribe to your newsletters during the checkout process. Also, there are people who are more likely into window shopping so, they tend to subscribe to your newsletters from your product pages so that they can get to know about new offers and items.
Also, there are people who tend to subscribe to newsletters that come with a more colorful and attractive banner hoping the content would also be enriching, and not boring.
Newsletters are such pieces of content that can really help you a lot in gaining credibility and building trust for your brand among your potential buyers.
So, this secondary goal is definitely something important and you cannot just ignore tracking it if you wish to gain more credibility for your brand. In fact, it should be one of your main priorities as a marketer.
Interaction With Website Features
You might find this point quite obvious, and it of course is. And that is because, this is one of the most important things that marketers track though Google Analytics.
Of course, tracking how often people interact with your website features is definitely very useful too as it helps marketers understand how well their user experience endeavors is performing, in reality.
Speaking from an A/B testing perspective, tracking elements as in, page features like number of clicks on your CTA buttons, number of users engaging with your live chat as well as number of people clicking on your email address or phone number in order to get in touch with you, can really help you with important information.
Now, these features are not always the same for every business. They vary from niche to niche as well as depending on what your business goals are.
You can also set up website features in order to find out the same. For instance, being an investment firm, you might have multiple features set up in our website like investment calculators, interest calculators, and quizzes. Tracking these can really tell you a lot about the users that you are catering to.
For such a firm, tracking investment calculators or interest calculators paced at different positions in their website would really help them understand the position where it performs the best.
Highlighting Text
You might ask why is highlighting a particular text or a portion on your website so important?
Well, to let you know, it might not seem as so but often it plays a crucial role in letting you know about a few things that most people out there tend to ignore.
There can be two reasons behind people highlighting texts on your website.
Firstly, they might be highlighting a particular text or portion in order to take action on it. For instance, people often highlight the phone number or address on your website in order to copy them and call you or find your location on Google, respectively.
In such cases, you need to hyperlink them so that your website visitors can perform the action directly from your website.
Besides that, there can be another reason behind the same action. There are instances when a person is highlighting a particular text or phrase from your website. They might be doing that in order to copy the same and find the meaning of the same by searching it on Google.
Well, this is, of course, not a good thing from a marketing perspective as it directly refers to the fact that you are not providing enough information or answers in your website and that is why people are getting forced to look for it on Google. And, if this is a case on your website too, then you need to take care of the same as soon as possible.
Now, coming back to the topic, how can you track this secondary goal mentioned in the former event?
To do this, you need to run A/B tests to find out if more and more people are calling you or hitting on the link to Google Mas when your phone number or address is hyperlinked.
You can easily find that out easily by comparing results on Google Analytics and see if hyperlinking your phone number and address has turned beneficial.
Pageviews In Category and Subcategory
Pageviews in the category and subcategory sections are quite important, and a good lot of marketers out there do not realize that.
If you are one of them, then just to let you know, category pages on your website contain lists of related pages on your website. Its main goal is to help website visitors find out what they are looking for, with ease.
And, when it about subcategory pages, they are further branches of category pages and help users by providing more detailed structure to the web experience of your potential buyers.
Now the main question happens to be, why should you track these pages?
You may track the category and subcategory pages to find out the number of people who have clicked on those pages, you can also find out the bounce rates for such pages, and by tracking these pages you will also get to know if there are any category and subcategory pages that do not have high engagement levels.
By getting more insights about the same, you will be able to make changes accordingly, like, optimizing page names, changing the order in which they are placed, or you can also make your subcategories clearer as well as more condensed to make it easier for your website visitors to view them.
Interaction With Social Media Sharing Buttons
Don’t you feel awesome when you find out that people have been sharing your content? You do, right?
When your website visitors are sharing your content, that does not just mean that you are being able to resonate with your target audience but, it also means that your website visitors are introducing people with your brand.
And as social media is just another free marketing tool, so, sharing content there is always a bonus.
Now, when comes to A/B testing, by track this event, not only you will be able to track how many people are sharing your content on several social media platforms, but you will also get to know if your content is getting share on a particular social media platform, compared to others.
You will also be able to find out if people are sharing with your blogs or are they sharing more of your videos? In such case, you can go ahead and find out where they are sharing your videos to.
In this case, of course, Google Analytics will help you to a certain extent, but it is also a good idea to check what your social media tools are saying about the same.
Conclusion
You do definitely have some business goals for your particular business. To find out if you are taking the right steps in order to achieve those goals, you definitely need a tool which can help you see the metrics.
But before getting started you need to see where you stand with your business right now. Check that first and then you can start with checking whether you are going up with your A/B testing endeavors or not.
When you have already figured out what your baseline is, you can just get started with any JavaScript Management System or Google Optimize to run A/B testing and measure your secondary goals.
So, on a concluding note we will be saying that while you are performing A/B testing, do not limit yourself to just primary goals. Make full use of it by tracking your secondary goals too.
This will help you focus more on what is required to increase your conversions as well as your ROI.
So, get on it right now! What are you waiting for?
