How To Do A/B Split Testing With Thrive Content Builder

How to get higher conversion rates? By regularly testing your landing pages. Don’t believe anything or anyone, your business is unique, your landing page is unique and what works for other may not work for you.

Even if you think you know something for sure, challenge yourself and see if doing it the other ways around is really wrong, or might be even better.

If you are using Thrive Content Builder I can almost say for sure that you are using it for at least some kind of marketing purposes.

Maybe you created an opt-in page with it to get more email subscribers, or you designed a beautiful sales page to sell that ebook you’ve been working on for the last couple of months. Whatever you did and no matter how many leads or sales you’ve got I’m sure you can do better.

You’ve guessed it – improve your marketing efforts by split testing your landing pages.

How to do A/B split testing with Thrive Content Builder

Short answer – you can’t. At the moment of writing this article Thrive Content Builder doesn’t have a built-in A/B testing feature, like they do in Thrive Leads for example.

I know a lot of people want that feature badly and I know Thrive Themes is working on it as we speak, hopefully they will include it in Thrive Content Builder 2.0.

Until then, we have to find ourselves another solution, which won’t be bad at all, as you’ll see in a second.

WordPress split testing with Nelio A/B Testing plugin

Nelio A/B Testing is a WordPress plugin specifically made to help you split test any page or post in your WordPress powered blog.

They have a free WordPress plugin (download it by clicking on free trial) which gives you up to 1000 page views to test as a free trial, but if you want more you’ll need to become a paid customer.

I know this will push some of you off, but if Nelio A/B testing is too expensive for you at $29/mo you probably don’t have that many customers or traffic yet and free 1000 page views will be enough. But if you have a real business you will fall in love with Nelio A/B Testing instantly, because it’s so easy to create split tests.

Creating your first split test with Nelio A/B Testing plugin

Tests in Nelio AB plugin are called experiments, so the first thing you want to do is go and Add an experiment.

There are several options to choose from when adding a new experiment, and they are:

• A/B Test Your Landing Page – Pure A/B Testing from the very beginning! Create one or more alternatives of your landing page and see which one converts better! If your website starts at your Landing Page, why shouldn’t you start it first?
• New A/B Test for Pages –  Pure A/B Testing! Create one or more alternatives of a page and change whatever you want: the colors, the text, the layout… and do it using your default WordPress editor! Then define the goals and you’re ready!
• New A/B Test for Posts – Pure A/B Testing! Create one or more alternatives of a post and change whatever you want: the colors, the text, the layout… and do it using your default WordPress editor! Then define the goals and you’re ready!
• New A/B Test for Headlines – Headline Testing is perfect for Publishers. Try with different Titles, Featured Images, and Excerpts, and check which combination is more appealing. Every time the Headline is printed somewhere in your site, it is counted as a visit. If a visitor accesses the post, you have a conversion!
• New A/B Theme Test – Would you like to change your WordPress completely? Do you want to test small variations of two child themes? Then this gives you what you need! Just keep in mind to configure each theme individually before using this kind of experiment.
• New Heatmap Experiment for Pages or (Custom) Posts – If you don’t know how to get started with A/B Testing, run a Heatmap Experiment and discover how your users behave when navigating through your website! This is one of the easiest ways to get ideas on what to do next.
• New A/B CSS Test – Do you want to change the appearance of your WordPress site, but tweaking only small elements here and there? Then CSS Tests is what you’re looking for. Create one or more CSS fragments that will be applied to your website and discover which one offers the better results.
• New Custom Post Type Test – Pure A/B Testing! Create one or more alternatives of a custom post type and change whatever you want: the title, the text, the custom fields… and do it using your default WordPress editor! Then define the goals and you’re ready!
• New Widget Test – Do you want to arrange widgets in a different order, use different widget setups, or even introduce completely new widgets? Then Widget Tests is what you need. Select and arrange the widgets you need as a new alternative and discover which one offers the better results.
• New Menu Test – Menus are one of the most important elements in your WordPress site, for they get a lot of attention from your visitors. Modify the labels of your menu items, rearrange them, or use a completely different menu and test which one helps you get more conversions!

As you can see there’s basically an experiment option for almost any kind of split test you can think of.

Since we are using Thrive Content Builder here I chose the first option – AB Test Your Landing Page.

This is the first step where you need to name your experiment, add a description to it if you want and select your control page (original page), which is the page that will “fight” with your alternative pages so you can see which one is going to win (perform better).

And here you will choose the alternative landing pages which will compete with your original/control page.

You can add just one alternative or multiple different alternatives. If you don’t have that much traffic go with just one. If you have a lot of traffic go with 2 or more alternatives.

And finally, the last step is defining your goals / conversion actions.

You can add just one goal/conversion, or more of them. I suggest that you use just one if you are doing split tests for your opt-in forms or sales pages. But it really depends on what are you actually testing.

So, you have 4 available conversion actions to choose from, and they are:

• Page – A visitor access a page in your WordPress site
• Post – A visitor access a post in your WordPress site
• External Page – A visitor tries to access an external page (either by clicking a link or by submitting a form) specified using its URL.
• Click – A visitor clicks on an element in your site (for instance, a button, a link or an image)

Since we are testing landing pages made by Thrive Content Builder you should choose a Page (first icon) as your conversion action.

And then you just select a page which a visitor will see after a conversion (for example a Thank you page after they subscribe, or an Order receipt page after they make a purchase, or a One-Time-Offer (OTO) after they but the front-end offer etc.).

You click Create and you’re done, your first experiment is ready to start receiving traffic.

You just need to click on Start to activate the experiment (option shown when you hover over your experiment name in the Experiments list page).

Nelio A/B Split Test Experiment Results

This is my favorite feature of Nelio A/B Testing plugin, their experiment results page. All statistics are presented in a beautiful way with clearly shown results.

Check the image below (click to zoom in) and see for yourself.

You can see exactly how your original/control page performed against alternatives and which page had the best conversion rate.

With these kinds of statistics it’s so simple to do A/B tests and choose a winner.

If you need even more info you can click on Alternatives tab at the top of experiments results which will automatically show you the winner landing page. Heck, you can even see heat maps for each landing page, how cool is that? 🙂

By clicking on Apply button you can automatically overwrite your original page with the winning alternative page if you want, but be careful with this option because after it’s done you can’t bring it back.

Wrapping up

And there you go, doing split testing and A/B testing on your WordPress website and with Thrive Content Builder has never been easier.

Now go ahead, download Nelio A/B Testing plugin and start improving your landing pages. In case you use some of The Landing Factory templates in your split tests let us know.