The arrival of social networks has allowed for quick dissemination of content – in a few hours, articles can fly over the whole of the internet, and YouTube videos can have millions of views.

Social networks have become an important channel for news sites. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, the way people consume news has changed. Readers suddenly don’t need to go to the home page of the news site – it’s enough to follow Facebook and news will come to them (either from friends or directly from the Facebook page of the media outlet).

Creating content with the potential to be shared a lot – if they want to keep their visitors – has thus become one of the most important missions of news-providing media. As has paying careful attention to their Facebook page. The key is to post the right statuses and keep in close contact with their readers.

The arrival of social networks, however, has also given news-providing websites one particular problem: creating viral content is not easy and cannot be made “on request” – sometimes it works, and sometimes it simply doesn’t. Similarly, not every article is popular on social networks and, as such, it doesn’t make sense to spread every text you write, but only some of them.

What kind of content do people like the most

What content do people like enough to share? What do they find to be the most fun? What type of content produced by news-providing sites works in the context of social networking?

Kristofer Mencak, a Swedish marketing specialist on viral content who has published books on the subject, has defined 12 indicators of virality. They include most of the viral content produced by news-providing sites.

Let’s look at them. You’ll probably find most of them familiar, but have you thought about them while you were posting a link to an article on Facebook?

Something funny – a large majority of content that goes viral falls into the funny category. In relation to news sites, the funny element works even better as it actually reflects real events “from real life”, which works much better than had the content been made up. A good example was an article “Married couple got high on a side dish” – three paragraphs describing how a couple exchanged marijuana for spinach received more than a thousand shares on Facebook and a few hundred thousand reads within a few hours.

Something wondrous – “The best example that the wondrous or miraculous works is the circus,” says Mencak. “Everyone wants to see something that is impossible” An example of such an article could be “Hero of the day – Captain Sully landed on river Hudson” about the miraculous maneuver performed by the American civilian airplane captain, who managed an emergency landing on the river, thus saving the lives of many people.

Something sexy – all tabloid themes with a sexual context, especially if they include something surprising, are also strong subjects. An example is the article, “Doctors say looking at busty women for 10 minutes a day is good for your health” on this tabloid site.

Something taboo – subjects people don’t like to talk about but think about a lot attract much attention. The more taboo a subject is, the more reactions it draws.

Secrecy – if something is secret, its price automatically increases regardless of whether the information itself has any value for the reader. Good examples are news articles containing secret documents or recordings such as documents published by WikiLeaks.org.

Something very personal – content which concerns specific groups of people – the information can be either personal in the right sense of the word or information that addresses them directly in another way. An example would be information about how an increase in taxation affects a certain category of earner.

Something controversial – if some social phenomenon draws different opinions, it usually spreads massively.

Something very current, with an uncertain outcome – in the case of sites providing news, this usually means informing about natural disasters, wars, coups and other significant events – especially if their outcome is uncertain.

American scientist Yury Lifshits in a study “Social analytics for online news” analyzed for Yahoo Labs what is read the most on news websites. In the study, he analysed the way the 45 biggest American sites share their content on social networks. “The 40 most-shared news items include much about lifestyle, photo galleries, interactive infographics, humour and relaxing reads. Four of the 40 most-shared articles are about current political affairs, three about celebrities. But the most popular are opinions and analyses,” says the study. According to Lifshits, the key is surprise. “Content that you can imagine someone emailing with either ‘Awesome!’ or ‘WTF?’ in the subject line gets spread”, the author says in Nieman Journalism Lab.

Four hints on how to make your Facebook page more interesting

Does your online news-site have a Facebook page? If so, here are four hints to attract more attention to your posts and thus more readers for your site:

• Choose well – don’t post too much, but choose articles suitable for social networks. You can see above which ones they are. Two to three posts per day are an acceptable maximum. Post more only in special circumstances (for example during elections, natural disasters – i.e. in times when people are more interested in getting information).
• Include a fun status – even if you are a serious news provider, be more personal and relaxed on social networks. This tip really works – try adding a bit of the funny and cool to your statuses and comments. Your credit won’t go down –on the contrary.
• Select content out of your website – do you have a great caricature? Don’t link to your website– post it directly as a photo. Do the same with video or a whole funny passage of your text. Are you worried that it won’t increase number of visits to your site? Perhaps not today, but a good picture will increase the reach of your page, so the next time you post a link, more people will read it.
• Don’t post yourself only – don’t be afraid to post links to other websites. Your readers want good content – they don’t mind that this time it’s not produced by you. If you give them good content, they will read your posts. Even those in which you promote yourself.

Three quick hints on how to reach more people by your Facebook posts

Until now, we have discussed mainly what kind of content is the most interesting, but very often the form is the key as well. Web page blog.bufferup.com summarized research about how to make your posts more attractive.

• Photo better than a status: A saying goes that it’s better to see once than to hear a thousand times. In translation to Facebook, it means that according to statistics, photos receive 53% more likes than comments and have a 84% higher click-through rate than text posts. If you can tell something with a picture rather than a text status, don’t hesitate to do so.
• Be brief: Are you in a mood to elaborate? Not a good idea: short posts (less than 250 characters) get two-thirds more people than long posts.
• The right days and the right hours: When should you write? If you have a Facebook page, you have surely noticed that time is crucial. The rule goes that the best time is when people aren’t working but are still not away from the internet. Ideal then would be the evening before sleep (around 10 pm), in the morning before work or during lunch. As far as days during the week go, statistics say that Thursday and Friday seem the best. But it’s often more complicated than that. The weather plays a significant role for example– if it’s the first beautiful day after weeks of weather misery, don’t expect people to stand in line to like your posts. Similarly, a rainy Sunday afternoon can turn out to be the best time.

As is usually the case though, the most effective and helpful tool – or rather a technique from those mentioned above – is the one that also costs the least. Have you done usability testing yet? No? In that case, if you’re going to do one single thing, throw away all the other tools and techniques and start doing usability tests – they will take your website the farthest.

In this article, we’ll take a look at what you need to do and what you should know before you start testing.

What we’ll need

A usability test is nothing more than tracking a user during the time he or she is using your site. Really, that’s it. No measuring of eye movement, level of stress or anything else that needs hi-tech tracking – just a simple recorded (shot of the computer screen they’re sitting behind and their voice) dialogue between you and them. And of course the tasks you request them to do on your website.

So, no measurable indicators – CTR, time spent on site, etc.? Precisely! Questionnaires or Google Analytics will provide you with lots of data, but it doesn’t get much better than seeing the person in action with the possibility of asking what they think. I guarantee that after a usability test, you’ll know right away what needs to be done even without knowing exact percentages or having data to feed into a graph.

Like with any cooking recipe, we too will start with the ingredients we’ll need. There isn’t much of it, yet it’s still a good thing to specify them.

• A quiet room – it may sound strange but if there is something that can ruin the result of a usability test, it’s having someone disturb you. Are you in an open space office? If so, forget right away that you would do a usability test at your work station. An ideal place for a usability test is a small room, two chairs and a desk – no disturbing elements. Let people know not to disturb you during the time of the test. Turn off your phone.

• A standard computer and browser – although the object of testing during the usability test will be your website, people you’ll be working with will have a feeling you are testing them. Despite being told otherwise, they will not get rid of this feeling. Don’t add to their stress by making them learn to use your gaming mouse or keyboard with different characters. Use the most standard computer most people are used to. In the author’s country, this would be a laptop with Windows, a plain mouse and Chrome browser. Have more browsers prepared and let the participant choose which to use. The more they feel at ease and as if working with their own computer, the better for them and you too.

• Microphone and a program for recording your computer screen – During the test, you will record what the participant is saying as well as the browser window they’ll be surfing in. This is important because you won’t have time to take notes and will not remember all the issues that will come up. Laptops, as well as desktops, often have built-in microphones; however, it has proven useful to the author of this text to have an external microphone. A simple cheap mic for Skyping will do very well.

Selection of a recording program may be something of an obstacle as there aren’t many good quality solutions. For us, a good choice proved to be Camtasia Studio. It can record the screen as well as sound and later allows the recording to be cut, highlight parts of the video such as a mouse click, rolling over an element, etc. The program is not exactly cheap but has a 30-day trial version, so you can start with tests for free and later decide whether investing in the software is worth it.

What will we test?

Question “What will we test?” may sound ridiculous to you. You probably already know about the weak spots on your website – perhaps you were notified by email from users, or you’ve seen something in the statistics. Maybe you’ve asked yourself already why no one clicks on the Editorial Team link at the bottom of the page, while at the same time you get asked by users whether you’ve considered having one.

If you haven’t done usability tests before, I would guess the first ones you do will be of a very general character. You will want to look at your website as it is and its key functions, and find out whether users know how to use them or if they have a problem using them, and last but not least, how you could improve and simplify the way your website is used.

Later, you will probably concentrate more on in-depth issues and usability tests will focus on only one of the sections or just an individual function of your website. Either way, your task now is to transform all intentions into assignments for the participants in your test. How do you go about it?

Close your eyes and imagine all the key functions that make up your website. You can forget about the details for now – the most important elements will do for now. Imagine an average person and what he or she actually does on your website. Usually arrives, looks at the homepage, clicks on an article. Then what? Perhaps he wants to enter the discussion? Or maybe he wants to sign into your system email and read messages? Obviously, it’s different for every website but you should always keep in mind the most frequent and concrete scenarios of your website’s visitors.

Once you have them, you can start turning these scenarios into a story with assignments, ideally with some update theme. Set up concrete and fun assignments.

For example: “You’ve seen on TV that the government wants to increase taxes for people with higher income. You missed some parts of this information, therefore you decided to visit our website and confirm the missing details. Where would you look for this information on our website? Find out the percentage of this planned tax increase and the date the tax law should become effective”.

Notice that I haven’t used in this assignment the name of the section (go to section Economy, in the left-side menu click item xxx). This is exactly the method you should use too, as normally a user doesn’t know where things are. Since nobody tells users on the homepage where to find the information they are looking for, they have to find it on their own. Effectively, the user will now test your site for you and whether you have developed it well. Following the user’s path to finding the right link will show you how to make your website better.

Prepare about ten assignments in a similar manner. For each of them, try to create a specific situation and make it interesting or fun so as not to bore the participant. Be sure to make it clear exactly when the given assignment can be considered finished.

Are you testing one specific part of your website? It’s good to have the first two assignments of a different kind – “to trick” a little, but also for loosening up the user. When testing a specific thing, I personally try to hide it by breaking it into a number of different assignments so I don’t give away my intention. Ideally, at the end of the test, the participant shouldn’t really know what the main purpose of the whole test was.

Ready for some inspiration? A complete usability test can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QckIzHC99Xc

Selecting participants

How many people need to take the test in order to reach the optimal results? It may come as a shock to you, but 6-7 people will be enough.

Are you wondering why so few are needed when for any A/B testing questionnaire you need to have at least a few hundred participants to consider the data reliable? The answer is that when it comes to usability issues, we are all very much alike. You will find this out as soon as you start testing: the second participant will have very similar problems with your website as the first one, and this will repeat until you get to the last one. Using, say, 20 people instead of ten of course means finding slightly more issues on your website, but I guarantee that testing 6-7 people is absolutely sufficient for finding the most significant ones.

Which people to choose? You may be tempted to strictly adhere to demographic distribution, so here is my tip – don’t take it too seriously. (In the end, it will be hard to stick to a demographic distribution of users in a sample of 6-7 people.) Include men and women, younger and older, but the best thing you can do is to call on users that could potentially have a problem with your site.  If you call on a programmer to take part, he’ll probably be able to manage almost anything, but how about a user who isn’t so good with computers in the first place? You are better off choosing participants that will show you as many deficiencies as possible.

An important rule: never invite someone who is a “heavy user” of your site – a member of your editorial team for example, if you have a news website. Of course, there are exceptions when this rule does not apply (e.g. intranet testing), but for the majority of websites, inviting outside people – strangers not familiar with your website – is crucial. Ideally, of course, you would call on people that do not know your site at all. This, however, cannot be done in all cases – if your website targets brokers, an ordinary person won’t be able to help you much.

Another thing to consider is the question of payment for taking the test. You’ll find out in US literature that you should. My personal experience is to invite people without the promise of remuneration but rewarding them at the end anyhow (usually not with money though, but rather in the form of a small gift such as a book).

You may now have a good idea of who to invite. If not, here are a few tips from practice:

• Create a site with a simple questionnaire for people who would like to help with website development and link to it from your site. In a few hours, you are sure to have perhaps hundreds of contacts for willing people.

• If there is a place where users come, e.g. the reception area of a newspaper office where they renew subscriptions, position yourself there and ask directly whether they have time to take the usability test. Another way to do this is for the person on the desk in reception to ask and take the interested users directly to your office.

• Place an ad in the classifieds or post it on your Facebook page.

If you don’t want to do any of the above? We all have friends and acquaintances who don’t even know where we work or have never visited our websites – use them. Just one rule to keep in mind: never, never invite the same person for tests twice, especially if it’s the same test!

Carrying out a usability test

You have a quiet room, you have a computer ready (you’ve tested the recording and mic functionality), you have people coming and you have the assignments ready for them. What now? It’s time to carry out the usability test.

At the beginning of the test, you have to tell people what awaits them. In order not to influence the results, it’s ideal to tell everyone the same thing – that is, read the same text to all of them. You don’t have to come up with the wording on your own; usability expert Steve Krug has done it for you already, so don’t worry. You can download the English version of it here.

The text describes what will happen during the usability test and also includes a printable form of agreement for making sound and video recording. So now you can smoothly begin your assignments.

Now comes the most important part. You could have done everything perfectly up to now, but this is the point when everything can go wrong – your communication during the test. The following are the three most fatal mistakes. Avoiding them and sticking to the following method can make usability testing a brilliant tool.

• Do not help. Do you remember how you deliberately didn’t include specific instructions about what to do? This is exactly what you shouldn’t do either while the test is in process. Let’s say a participant has a problem with completing your assignment (can’t find a link to a page or has forgotten her password). Do not help her under any circumstances. You can try a formulation such as, “Try thinking about it some more”, “What would you do if I were not here?”, or “Unfortunately I can’t help you but as soon as the test is over, I’ll answer any of your questions”. If the participant cannot complete the assignment for a long time, end it. It is difficult not to help a person who is obviously in trouble. I personally managed to “fail” a few times when I administered my first usability test. While it is difficult, it is very important because if you help the participant, you may as well throw the results away because you can’t be sure that you didn’t bring the user somewhere she wouldn’t otherwise have got to on her own. There of course are situations when you can help – for example if a strange window, not relevant to your website, pops up, or the mouse is disconnected, etc. – but don’t ever say, “And why don’t you try clicking here?”

• Ask what they’re thinking about – keep on prompting the participant to say what he’s thinking about, to verbalize what he’s trying to do as much as possible. The instruction to do so was already included in the introductory text you read out at the beginning, however, some participants will tend to forget – you should do all you can to make sure there isn’t silence in the room and the participant speaks as much as possible. That is the key to improving your website – every one of the participant’s thoughts will move you forward.

• Praise and eat humble pie – many people you invite will say, “I’m not smart enough for this” and when they can’t do something, they will repeat the phrase. Participants will constantly feel as if you are testing their abilities. Use every opportunity to disagree with them: “I’m not sure where to click?” “Thank you – you have just found a huge shortcoming in our website. Actually, you’re doing it right, and it’s us who developed the website who got it wrong because you can’t find what you’re looking for.” After the test is over, tell them again how much they have helped you. You can even show them the right solution to their task.

After the test

The first thing that shows you’ve done the usability test right is that the results are absolutely horrible. Users had problems finishing your tasks, you’ve noticed mistakes you made in planning the site, users do things in a very different way than you thought when building the site. These are the results you’re looking for. If you, the website developer, feel miserable, be assured that this is exactly the kind of feeling you needed to reach.

In order to transform the usability test results into a better website, do the following:

• Share the results with everyone – Do not keep, under any circumstance, the test results just to yourself. Let as many colleagues as possible see the video recorded during the test. Definitely show it to designers, project managers and programmers. Don’t be shy to show it to other people who worked on the development of the site. Practically anyone from the team can learn something from a usability test. Before you show them the video, give them a pen and paper and ask them to take notes with ideas on what to change on the web in order to prevent some of the problems the next time around. I’ll bet everyone will have a paper full of various thoughts. Are you all too busy to watch a 5- or 6-hour long recording? Cut the usability test video – leave out the parts where participants succeed in their tasks and pick out the “cherries on the top”.

• Have a discussion and make a list of changes. After watching the video, compare your lists and write the problems on a big board. A huge discussion is surely to arise. A long list will be created. Set a priority for each item – mark the issues according to how big they are.

You will notice as you go along how the view of the web changes in the team. At the beginning of the exercise, someone may say something like, “Are these users completely stupid?” And then, when they see that every test participant had a problem with the same thing, they will go quiet. You will notice the effect of a usability test on the work of the team in the future. A programmer will try to simplify everything as much as possible right in the beginning. A project manager may want to run a usability test during the design stage. The owner will approve a budget for usability tests.

The possibility of seeing users utilizing your site in real time is something that will completely change the way you work.

How to solve issues discovered

One of the things that happens to you after a usability test is that you suddenly get a feeling that you completely need to change your website. You’ll probably feel that it’s badly designed; programmers may arrive with an idea to re-program the whole site. One of the worst things you could do, though, would be succumbing to these temptations.

Any usability issue found can be resolved in two ways: the complex way (total redesign) or the dilettante/superficial way (do the absolute minimum in order to remove the problem). Based on a number of years of experience, I recommend choosing the second option.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at the following list:

Dilettante solution vs. complex solution

• Much less people will be affected by the issue / No one or almost no one will be affected by the error
• Easily implemented / Requires much effort to implement
• Finished in a few minutes, a day the most / Can take a month or two, and may actually never be finished

Complex solutions seem to be clean and thorough. In reality though, it means you are starting from zero. In the end, the fact that you have done it over again doesn’t mean that you have not made the mistakes again or haven’t created new ones. On the contrary, if you redo something completely, you will end up facing a dilemma at the end what to do with the new issues.

Usability expert Steve Krug introduced a rule he calls “Do as little as possible”. Always look for the fastest solution to fix an issue. Only when that doesn’t work, use something more complex.

Here is an overview of Krug’s points:

Do not redesign, tweak (Krug’s No. 1 rule of successful mistake correction)

• Everybody hates redesigns, so if you suggest a wholly new solution, they will complain anyway.
• You may solve your problem with a redesign, however, it’s almost certain you will make at least five other, perhaps more serious, mistakes.
• Do the smallest changes possible – tweak until the problem is solved. If that doesn’t help, revert to a more serious solution.
• It often means that you want to increase the font, change the background color of a message or something along those lines.

Do not add, removing something is much better (Krug’s No. 2 rule of successful mistake correction)

• People usually feel that adding something will work better, let’s say a new notice or phrase. Often, it’s much better to remove something. Most mistakes are actually caused by organization on the site being so complicated that it becomes chaotic. This is a very frequent reason for mistakes.
• Always consider the list of issues in relation to effectiveness. If there are small issues which affect only a few users and would take too long to fix, don’t bother with them. There are probably ten larger issues that can be addressed quickly. Focus on these first and then on the others.

How do you find out whether you have improved the product? Simple, run the same usability test again … with different participants, of course.

Now you know everything important about usability tests. If you’d like to know more, I recommend two of Steve Krug’s books: Don’t make me think and Rocket surgery made easy. They are short, funny and will tell you everything you need to know.

So what is A/B testing? Simply said, A/B testing is a method which allows you to measure the effect of changes to your website on the visitors without actually making them.

Imagine as an example a web page with an article to which you make a small change – let’s say you move a picture from its current place in the right column into the center. Now comes the trick: you display the new layout version to a very small portion of your visitors. What will happen? Will visitors stay on the page for a longer or shorter time? Will a smaller or a larger percentage of readers finish reading the article?

After a few thousand views of both versions, you will be able to neatly and relatively exactly compare and determine whether the change is – or is not – an improvement. If indeed it is, you know what to do – change the picture position for everyone. If not, no problem – you can test some more.

You can test any changes this way – always on a small percentage of visitors and find out whether something works even before widely implementing it. And what is important, you are not limited to testing just one change but for example five different options. Using the same example as above, you can test positioning the photo in various places (left column, right column, top, center…) and by trial, find out where its positioning works the best.

Simply speaking, A/B testing gives you a luxury that we would probably welcome in all parts of life – the possibility of not having to make a decision every time we want to do something and then wait and worry whether we have made the right decision.

Instead, thanks to A/B testing, you have the option to choose the best solution from the multiple possibilities before making it available to all your readers.

Why should we run A/B tests?

A/B testing is one of the most practical tools for improving your website, primarily for the following reasons:

• Low cost, quick start: one of the best things about A/B testing is that, unlike using questionnaires or usability tests, you can start immediately. And if you decide to use one of the free services that are available, you won’t even incur any costs. No complicated searches for participants or long preparation times. One test idea and an observation of certain rules discussed below and you can be on your way. You don’t have to hire an expert. You can easily do it just with this article.

• The right sample: With a survey or questionnaire, you will always face questions such as “do we have the right sample of people?” or whether the group of people surveyed had been “representative”. There are no such questions in A/B testing – you know 100 percent that you have the right sample. It’s the people that come to your website, exactly those that you are improving your site for. There is no need to look for anyone elsewhere.

• Very practical: Standard questionnaire surveys often bring theoretical findings, such as people are more interested in sports news or perhaps that they would welcome more videos in articles. But what should an ideal piece of sports news look like? Where exactly should the video be in the article? A/B testing, together with usability tests, offer very practical findings, which are – as a bonus – all immediately applicable. They not only provide you with information about what to do but also how exactly to do it.

Getting started with A/B testing

So how do we do A/B testing?

1. Hypothesis. At the beginning of each test, having a “hypothesis”, i.e. a question you want answered by the test, is very important. For example – “Would visitors click more on an article if it had a larger headline?” Any new function you would like to implement on the website is also a hypothesis – e.g. will the function bring a better reaction from the visitors? You probably already have a number of ideas as to what to test. You can also find some tips below.
2. Alternate versions. The second step is the proposal of changes with which we will verify the hypothesis – let’s say the creation of alternative versions of the original website with new functionality or design. At this point, it is important not to limit yourself to just one alternative to your current site. You can come up with as many versions as you would like. This way, you can be sure that you have not missed the best solution possible. For example, if you are testing a larger headline for your article, why not include various fonts, colors and/or size? The test will let you know the best solution.
3. Test variables. Often, defining the test variables is a much underestimated step. A test variable is anything you can measure and which allows you to objectively determine which page is better. It could be the number of clicks on a certain link, the time spent on a page or even whether a visitor had completed a certain operation (confirmation of a subscription payment). People frequently measure the number of clicks, but is that always the best? Always consider carefully what to measure and test more variables. That way you can see whether your new version won’t do more harm than good (e.g. the change forces more readers to click but they leave the page immediately because they hadn’t found what they were looking for).

Which tools to use for A/B testing?

Once you have done all three things listed above, only one thing remains – deploy the test. Let’s look closely at how to do it.

Ideally, you would use one of the ready-made solutions available. There are plenty of them and some are even for free. And it is certainly simpler than having the A/B testing tool custom programmed directly for your website – a solution which is possible, but definitely not simple.

When choosing, look mainly for simple implementation (do you have a programmer at hand or will the tests be administered by someone who knows programming?). Of course, the price is also crucial. Paid tools often offer free tutorials or assistance, so free does not always equal the best.

Here is a list of some of the best known A/B testing tools:

Google Analytics is among the best known A/B testing tools. One of its main advantages when compared to competing products is the fact that it’s free. And it works in a simple way: basically, you create and add all versions of your web page to the server – if the current page is at article.php, you create article1.php, article2.php, etc.

What follows is an easy step-by-step process of implementation:

If you do not have an account in Google Analytics, create one and after registering, click “Experiments” in the “Behavior” section of your website profile. Click on “Create experiment”.

Type in the URL of the website you want to test (in our example, it’s article.php) and select the measured variable – for example average visit duration, revenue, etc. Decide the percentage of your users you want to include in the experiment – determine the number according to the number of users that usually visit your site – if you have a lot of visitors, you can test the page on 1% of your visitors. If, however, you have few visitors, you could wait for the results from a 1% sample for a long time.

Then you just add the URLs of the changed pages to be tested. The last step is to add a special JavaScript code to each one. The code will determine which page is shown to which user.

And that’s all. You can find more details on how to do A/B testing with Google Analytics here.

Optimizely.com is one of the best known paid tools for A/B testing. Other paid tools mentioned below all work in a similar way. Compared to Google Analytics, they all have one significant advantage – you do not need a programmer to run the test – it’s enough to include in the page one very simple JavaScript code. Everything else can be “clicked” and selected without needing to know the source code. It’s almost as if you were editing text in Word or some other text editor – you can play around and change the text, the font size, anything. You choose the percentage of visitors to which you’ll display the tested version and select the measured variables. The tool saves the changes and, after starting the test, it will display your altered pages to random visitors.

Other popular A/B testing tools include Unbounce.com or VisualWebsiteOptimizer.com. Choose the one that suits you best. An overview of the best known tools is here.

Understanding the results

Most of the split testing tools offer results as you go along and even calculate which version has the highest chance of winning the test. At the same time, the tool helps to determine the right sample. At this point in the process, you don’t need to do anything else.

This, however, can become a double-edged sword. Despite the simplicity of A/B testing, it can be spoiled (just like anything in life). Watch out for these common mistakes:

• One variable, one hypothesis – one of the most common mistakes in A/B testing is that we want to test too many things at the same time. An example would be two completely different article visuals (each has a completely different layout, ordering, as well as elements). Remember: one A/B test, one hypothesis you are testing, one change. This is a way to avoid potential problems of not being able to understand what actually brought the change when reading the test result. Was it the background color? Or omission of a large ad space? Always change only one thing. Then test it.

• Attention – sample size too small. The second most common error is impatience. Frequently, one of the tested versions can have much better results very early on. Do not stop the test! Continue to the end of the test – it can often have very different results at the end than it seemed at the beginning. Contemporary A/B testing tools contain a function which automatically calculates the number of users you need to test in order to ensure the test is right. Here you can find a calculator which helps you to find out the approximate sample size even before running the test. If you are testing a large number of versions, it pays off to wait a little longer for results. Also, you may want to repeat the test one more time – test fewer versions the second time (e.g. original vs. winner and runner-up from the first test).

• Poorly chosen metrics. Even if you manage all of the above well, there is still a chance you are failing in the selection of the metrics with which you’ll be measuring the effect of your changes. Is the version that gets more clicks really better for you? Or are you more interested in whether visitors, after they click, subscribe to your publication? Number of clicks tends to be an alpha and omega for online media so pay attention to other criteria that may prove significant for you.

Testing tips

You surely have many ideas on what to test. A/B testing is practical any time you want to introduce something new and you discuss in your team how to proceed the best way. Don’t limit yourself to new functions you’d like to add to your site though. Think about things already present on your site, especially:

• Things that seem self-evident to you (if you hear someone say “people love xxx”, “the best way to do this is xxx” without having A/B test results to prove it, don’t just believe the statement – try it).

• Things on your site you think are done really well (this link has many clicks, the ad in the right corner works beautifully) – what if these things can be done even better? Don’t forget that every hundredth of a conversion counts!

• Things you think don’t matter (font color, font size, or moving an ad box 10 px more to the right). If you test a lot, you’ll find out that many of the results may not make much sense to you, yet they work. Do not rely on your rational criteria only and do not think that minute details don’t matter. They do – test everything.

Here are a few tips for tests you can run right now:

• A correct looking lead on the home page – is a smaller headline, full-width photo and no lead, or a larger headline, smaller photo and more text better? Or should it be altogether different? Come up with all different possibilities and find out what users prefer.

• Ad formats – you know that when there are too many, they don’t work; when there are only a few, conversion is higher but revenue smaller – so what is the right ratio? Try out different ad distribution on your page and select the best one.

• Homepage layout – there’s an everlasting fight within online media about the homepage. Each service, each journalist wants to see his or her article there, yet they cannot all be there. What is the right number of articles for visitors to still click? Which section is better suited for the right column and which will do better in the middle? The simplest way to find out is trying it.

• Test the wording of all buttons on your page. Compare “Enter the article discussion” to “Discuss the article now” for example. Test what works best and you may be surprised.

You can find lots of ideas and inspiration for A/B testing at www.abtests.com. It includes a number of case studies, so you can see the findings right away. Many of you may be surprised by them.

Still not enough? Suggested reading about A/B testing includes Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer. Although recommendations related to the implementation of Google Analytics experiments (the tool was formerly known as Website Optimizer) have become obsolete, the book offers hundreds of ideas and ways to improve your web site.
So what are you waiting for? Dive into A/B testing now!