Controversial: AB testing is a waste of time for startups

You’ve probably heard a lot about the power of AB testing on your website and landing pages. But the truth is, in my opinion, that it’s a waste of time for companies with fewer than 1,000 visits per week.

The problem with AB testing on low-traffic websites is that there is not enough data to make informed decisions quickly.

In this blog, I’ll explain a more effective way to know which content works for your audience.

If you’re new to AB testing on websites, it’s when you create two or more versions of the same web page, split the traffic that is driven to them, and analyse which performs better. So you’ll learn which content is more effective.

Thankfully, there is a more effective way to AB test content

The main goal of AB testing is to know which content your target audience finds most engaging. The quickest way to do that is not via AB testing your website content. It’s by AB testing your ads.

If you’re in the exploratory/testing phase, I would recommend Meta Ads over LinkedIn ads, as the latter is very expensive.

You can create a series of ads with different text captions, creatives and calls to action.

You can then monitor your click-through rate (CTR).

The top-performing ads will tell you which content drives the most interest.

Take this example below from one of our clients at Rocket SaaS. You can see the top ad has the highest Average CTR. This tells us that more people clicked on this ad than all the others, relative to how many times it was seen.

Now that we know this ad’s content is a winner, we’ll update the website content to use similar messaging, resulting in the website conversions increasing.

To get even more granular, the next step with the ads is to find out exactly which part of the ad is more engaging. So we’ll clone and AB test the winning ad, tweaking one small thing at a time, such as:

• Copy
• Creative
• CTA

We’ll then find out exactly what content works best.

AB testing via your ads gives you insightful data in days, not months. So get to work creating those ads!