Supercharge Your Website AB Testing With Hello Bar

You should be testing the user behavior with one version of a variable vs another. For example, does the user behavior change when you change a call to action button from red to blue? Or does the user behavior change when you use one call-to-action text vs another? Or, does the user behavior change when you customize content to a user vs not. Ultimately, the goal is to collect data, see which one drives better conversions, and then adopt the winning approach. During this process, you may also get other user insights beyond just conversions. You may also see how certain changes impact bounce rate or time on site (both of which can be tracked through Google Analytics). Or you can see test results about return rates from certain approaches vs others (again, you can see test results in Google Analytics).

Something to keep in mind about testing is that your goal is to see how a change produces positive results. But, it’s just as important to understand when a hypothesis or proposed change is proven wrong. This often is frustrating but if something is proven wrong, this means you can save a lot of time, energy, and money on pursuing that change further. This is good news!

Hello Bar is a great, simple, and affordable way to run split testing and multivariate testing

The most common way to test hypothesis and collect data on conversion rates is to invest in building and managing landing pages. This approach can be highly effective and should be included in most of your marketing efforts whether paid or organic. But, building full landing pages can get very time-consuming and expensive. And, building enough to have statistical significance in your decisions (statistical significance involves collecting enough data that you have statistically significant results – in other words results you can depend on to be accurate), can be even more expensive and time consuming.

Hello Bar is a great, simple, and affordable tool to add to your testing efforts. Through Hello Bar, you can launch tests more quickly, test hypotheses more affordably, and gather test results faster. They are flexible enough to add to any webpage. So you can add Hello Bar to each landing page or to any normal webpage. You can also quickly and easily choose to serve Hello Bar to all website users or just to a selection. Hello Bar’s built-in A/B and multivariate testing makes it easy to quickly launch multivariate testing, get test results and get enough data to reach statistical significance.

Companies of all sizes use Hello Bars for website AB testing and multivariate testing. And, since the company was launched by design and optimization experts, customers can use best practices to ensure that they are launching tests that get quantitative user insights.

Why can Hello Bar can help you reach statistical significance more quickly?

Multivariate testing with a landing page is great. But, one challenge is getting enough results to track how users interact with each variable. With a landing page, you have to choose to drive a certain percentage of your traffic to that specific landing page to see how users interact. And, this means that you may have to sacrifice traffic that helps you reach certain goals to conduct testing. With Hello Bar, you can add testing units on top of any existing page or landing page to see how users interact. This means you can test messaging or calls to actions or incentives on any and all webpages and the interaction rates are similar or higher than what you would see on landers. This means you can collect more data more quickly.

How do you use Hello Bar for A/B and multivariate testing?

Hello Bar has a built-in testing features. If you want to test two versions of a call to action or variable, simply select A/B testing and put in the variables for each of the two versions. By default, Hello Bar will then flight these tests equally among the two versions. Hello Bar has built-in statistical analysis to see which performs better. You can have your digital marketing teams launch these tests for all visitors to a page. However, if your digital marketing teams want to test a certain target audience, you can also use Hello Bar’s built-in targeting features. You can choose a target audience based on a huge number of variables – from Geo to content type to words clicked within search engines, etc…

If you want more different versions than a simple A/B testing, this is also easy. With Hello Bar you can launch multiple different units and it’s easy to duplicate a unit to make one simple change. You then just need select a web page for each of those units and then manage how much traffic you want to get each of those units. Keep in mind, you can launch as many units as you want for testing, but you also will want to make sure your results are statistically significant. So, make sure that you have enough traffic to get to a point of statistically significant data. If you don’t know how to calculate this level, you can use search engines to type in “Statistically Significant” calculator or “how many users I need to test to determine statistical significance.”

When running tests, with Hello Bar, you can run tests on one web page, multiple pages or all pages on your site. This allows you to get similar multivariate test results to running tests with landing pages.

How many different variations can you run with Hello Bar?

The simple answer is that you can run as many as you want. However, we don’t recommend that unless you have a massive amount of traffic. This is because your testing process needs to factor in how long it will take to reach statistically significance. If your page only gets a few thousand visits per month, your testing process may need to last multiple months if you do a base a/b test. But, you may only need to run your test on one page for a few days (or even hours) if that web page gets tens of thousands of views per month. The key is how much data you need to capture in an a/b or multivariate test and how long you are okay waiting before making a decision.

Can you track the user journey somebody takes before or after your tests with Hello Bar?

This takes some additional knowledge of Google Analytics or another analytics platform but, yes, you absolutely can. This means tracking website visitors, create cohorts of those website visitors, and then seeing how each of those cohorts responds to the tests through your analytics platforms. If you have a lot of data, this can be very insightful because users react differently based on their goals and other demographics and psychographics.

What if you don’t have enough existing traffic to run tests to determine user behavior?

This actually is often the case and it comes down to how important the tests are to run. For example, new companies that are launching to the market still want to conduct website AB testing. This means these companies will build a marketing campaign just to drive users to a page and then test average click through rate or user engagement on what they are testing. This can be done through reaching to email lists, through partnerships or through paid acquisition. A marketing campaign for an ambitious company may include plans for immediate and future tests they want to run.

Do you have to replace landing pages to use Hello Bar to collect data?

No, and that’s the great thing! We can easily work alongside your favorite provider to collect data faster or collect different data from different users. This will allow you to get to statistically significant results faster. And, with the average click-through rate on Hello Bar so high, you can accelerate your efforts.

Can you use Hello Bar to help optimize your email marketing as well?

Yes, absolutely. Hello Bar can massively up your email marketing game. For example, you can use different email subject lines in your email provider and drive them to a page that has an important Hello Bar call to action on it. For example, you cant test how many leads one subject line drives vs another subject line. You can also create different urls and put those in your emails for easy split url testing. Let’s say that you want to test increasing average order value as an ecommerce store. With Hello Bar, you can run an A/B test with different coupon levels and then view conversion rates in your favorite analytics tools for measuring average order value.

What other conversion rate optimization can you do with Hello Bar?

Well, Hello Bar was one of the original conversion rate optimization tools and is still loved by CRO experts all over the world for tracking and optimizing visitor behavior. You can use Hello Bar to increase direct conversion improvements, collect actionable observations within your analytics or even use Hello Bar to ask for user input about certain potential changes/options you want to test.

Is Hello Bar hard to use?

No, that’s part of what makes Hello Bar so great. It’s super easy to use. It has a simple and powerful visual editor, plenty of templates (which you can use as is, use with minimal modifications or customize fully), and you can add it to one or many web pages. You can even use it to add to a checkout page. And the customer experience of Hello Bar units drive great user engagement an excellent conversion rate. in fact, Hello Bar’s average conversion rate is one of the highest in the market. And, our customers rave about the customer experience of using Hello Bar. We are proud that they rate their customer experience so highly across ease of use, affordability, service, and more.

Some last tips for using Hello Bar for website AB testing & Multivariate testing

Be sure to track outcomes clearly

Set up GA or your favorite analytics tool to make it easy to see the impact changes are having directly within GA.

Understand what level of certainty you are okay with

Use a calculator to determine what level of uncertainty you can live with before making a decision.

Weave a testing culture into all you do at your company

It’s not about whether you should do lander testing or use popup testing. Or, if you should test designs or colors or text. The answer is you should do all of those.

Don’t test too many things at once

If you do, you won’t know which change created which outcome.

Rely on experts

Rely on experts and educate yourself if you don’t know what you are doing. With Hello Bar, expert knowledge has been built in.

Have a testing plan

Draw out the various tests you want to run and when you want to run them.

Have a testing budget

Have a budget for testing and think of that budget as an investment as simple improvements can drive massive ROI.

Remember That Polling Is Testing Too

You can also ask your users what they think – Hello Bar is a great way to run simple polls or get feedback.

BE SPECIFIC ABOUT YOUR DESIRED OUTCOME

When running your multivariate tests and A/B tests, you need be very specific about the insights (including qualitative insights) you are trying gather. You can’t just launch multivariate tests and hope your overall numbers improve. Pick a specific desired outcome. For example, maybe you want to improve conversion rates on purchases on check out cart or conversion rates to an email list.

Some Side Notes

Hello Bar can also help with showing up in search results because it can improve engagement levels. And, a higher engagement tells search engines that your page is relevant which helps you Google optimize.

While Hello Bar doesn’t currently offer bars and units on mobile apps, mobile-centric apps can use Hello Bar. We hope to add Hello Bars for mobile apps. If you are interested and own mobile apps, email us to get on our beta list.