Experimentation and A/B Testing Tools For 2023. What’s the Best Solution For Your Business?

One of the main goals of any business is to increase profits. If you run an online business or manage your company’s website, an increase in profits is directly related to an increase in conversions. Whether it’s sales in an online store or filled-in contact forms by qualified leads, you want more of it. There are different strategies for optimizing your conversion rate (CRO). One of the most obvious is improving the user experience on your website or app. 

Experts say that an improved user experience can bring you up to 400% more sales and inquiries. But how do you start improving? Maybe your CTA text is not engaging enough? Or the contact form is located so low on the page that you are losing half of your potential customers? There is no reason to guess – all these assumptions can be tested and best solutions put into action. More than half (60%) of the companies on the Internet are already doing experiments, and the rest (35%) are planning to start doing tests in the near future.

What is an A/B testing tool?

A/B testing tools are software programs that allow you to set up tests on your websites and applications, get detailed statistics about the progress of experiments, and determine the winning variations.

In fact, it is possible to conduct testing without costly tool implementation. If you are not ready for large-scale investments yet, there are many free options or trial periods for paid platforms on the market.

How to choose your A/B testing tool?

Since there are plenty of choices on the market, in order to figure out and choose the best platform for your needs, you have to clearly define your requirements and limitations. Based on the resulting list, you can compare tools and narrow down the options from 20+ different instruments to the best 2 or 3.

Questions you need to answer:

• How experienced are you? Is this your first try and you want to get familiar with the method, or do you already have some experimentation skills and want to get more opportunities in your tests?
• What budget do you have? Do you want to consider only free options or are you ready to invest in the experimentation?
• Where do you plan to test? Do you need the ability to test in mobile applications? Can the requirements change in the foreseeable future?
• How massive do you plan to be in experimentation? Do you want to run many tests at the same time? Do you have a big team to set up and work with tests?
• What amount of average traffic do you get on your website? The size of the audience included in the experiments is most often prescribed in the price plans. Think about what kind of traffic you expect today. Do you think it could grow significantly soon?
• What industry do you work in? Are there specific use cases within your area that should be covered in the functionality of the platform?

Key Features to Pay Attention to Choosing A/B Tool

Compliance with your platform and programming languages

Make sure the tool you choose supports the platform you are working on and the programming languages ​​you use.

Integrations

If you are already using some third-party software for analytics, data management and visualization, or other purposes, focus on platforms that can integrate with these tools.

Ease of use interface

It is important that the interface of the tool is clear and easy to use for your non-technical employees. With such a tool, your marketing team will be able to create multiple tests and  accordingly make more improvements without relying on the IT department.

Ability to run code-based tests

Nocode testing is great to run lots of simple tests but if you want to compare more complex changes and involve your IT team into experimentation, you need to ensure that your solution supports code-based testing.

Data and reporting

Explore the capabilities of the tool in creating reports. Can you customize reports and create your own events? How deep can you segment your audience? Can you filter segment groups based on multiple attributes? Create saved segments? If you plan to conduct analytics and create reports in other tools, make sure that your A/B platform allows you to download raw test data or directly integrates into your external solution.

Ability to run tests on the server side

Can you choose where to run tests – on client side or server side? Depending on your situation you may need both options.

Ability to run multiple tests at the same time

Can the tool you are looking at or the pricing plan you choose support the number of simultaneous tests you need for the required audience sizes? Can your needs grow in the foreseeable future? Will the platform be able to support these changes?

Ability to run tests without updates in app stores

App stores require documentation and approval for updates, which can slow things down a lot. If your area of experimentation includes mobile apps, look for the tools that support testing without app store updates. 

Best A/B Testing Tools on The Market in 2023

Let’s look at an overview of some of the best products existing on the market today. Of course this list isn’t comprehensive…, we’ll review the most mentioned platforms covering various different business sizes and purposes. You can add more tools for your consideration, but don’t forget the steps mentioned above.

Optimizely

Optimizely – is one of the best, industry recognized all-in-one digital experience platforms offering lots of services for content management and digital marketing. What is important for us – experimentation and personalization are at the root of the platform. 

The main focus is on web experimentation, however Optimizely supports powerful testing capabilities for mobile applications and messaging platforms, as well as optimization of the entire customer experience across all touch points.

With Optimizely you can simultaneously (and safely) run multiple tests on the same page and be sure to get accurate results. You can run experimentations on the server side, and use various experiment segmentation parameters like device, browser, and campaign. 

Optimizely allows you to work with any programming language and supports 100+ integrations for all significant platforms on the market.

With 24 Fortune 100 companies as customers, Optimizely is aimed at enterprise clients with high traffic on their websites that take personalization and testing very seriously.

Learn more about Optimizely and Why Do You Need It?

VWO

Another popular name in the market is VWO (Visual Website Optimizer). This CRO tool is mostly appreciated by customers for its thoughtful User Experience and easy-to use UI. 

A visual drag and drop editor provided by VWO allows non-technical teams to conduct lots of tests fast and can be understood even by beginners in A/B testing. In addition, VWO supports code-based testing for more complex needs, and reporting in the tool is user friendly as well. 

One other special thing about VWO is its leverage of Bayesian statistics that helps you to run tests faster, have more control, and reach more accurate conclusions. VWO offers server-side testing, mobile app testing, multi-arm bandit testing as well as tons of other features for complex use cases. VWO is a great choice for organizations from midsize to large enterprises.

Adobe Target

Adobe Target is another widely known name. Among its features is extensive possibilities for omnichannel testing – including not only web and mobile – but IoT ecosystems and even offline touch points. One other special feature is robust AI and Machine Learning capabilities for personalization and testing automation provided by Adobe Sensei. 

Adobe Target would be the best choice for customers who already rely on Adobe products in their stack. Integrated with each other, they would give maximum efficiency in your CRO efforts.

Oracle Maxymiser

Here it would be logical to mention another A/B testing tool – Oracle Maxymiser. Along with testing on desktop and mobile apps, Oracle Maxymiser offers options for personalization, funnel optimization, predictive analytics, as well as advanced targeting and segmentation.

Like Adobe Target, Oracle Maxymiser is an A/B testing platform that is more suited to clients using the entire Oracle Marketing Cloud due to the seamless connectivity it offers across its product suite.

Omniconvert

Omniconvert – is another important tool on the market. Besides A/B Testing available on desktop, mobile and tablet devices, Omniconvert provides on-page surveys, personalization and overlays. 

The advanced segmentation feature of Omniconvert allows you to use more than 40 different parameters to build knowledge about your audience including geolocation, behavior, traffic sources, and even weather. 

Omniconvert also provides you with the leverage of Frequentist or Bayesian statistics so you can validate your tests and achieve results faster. 

This CRO tool is a good fit for e-commerce businesses and beginners since with the features included it is still affordable, and has an experiment debugger tool that helps you find errors in your tests.

AB Tasty

AB Tasty is a popular A/B testing tool that would be great for beginners or those who are looking for something not too complex. Apart from the usual A/B, split and multivariate testing it has an interesting feature of funnel-testing that enables you to experiment with changes across many pages at once. 

AB Tasty has both – a code editor and a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, and supports unlimited variations of a single web page or a website. It also includes engagement-based segmentation and psychographic AI to offer features, custom messages, and functionalities to the desired audiences. 

Kameleoon

Forrester at the 2020 Q4 Wave for Experience Optimization Platforms featured Kameleoon as a “challenger” for Optimizely, Adobe Target, and other legacy tools. Kameleoon’s focus is on data security and privacy. That is why this tool is a popular choice for healthcare, financial services and other organizations working with sensitive or non-public data.

E-commerce brands appreciate its solid Shopify integration and personalization features. Developers love Kameleoon for its Chrome extension, code editor, and helpful Git integration.

Apptimize

At its core, Apptimize is focused on experiments for mobile optimization, but today the tool offers ample opportunities for cross-platform testing. This includes websites, call centers, and advertising. 

Apptimize offers both a visual editor with full control and extended opportunities for code-based testing. The tool supports Objective-C, Swift, Java, HTML5, Xamarin, and React Native. If you can code it, you can test it with Apptimize. The tool will be an excellent choice for those companies that are focused on interaction through mobile devices.

ZohoPageSence

ZohoPageSense is an all-in-one tool for AB testing, conversion optimization, and personalization of web pages. This solution is suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises. 

In addition to testing various website elements, ZohoPageSense offers other tools such as funnel analysis, session recording, and form analytics. It also provides a research segmentation feature to filter reports to analyze visitor behavior.

Free A/B Testing Tools

Google Optimize

Google Optimize and Optimize 360 will no longer be available after September 30, 2023. Experiments and personalizations can continue to run until that date. Since you may still be able to use the tool, we leave information about it here, but please note that to date Google Optimize may only be a temporary solution and eventually you will have to switch to another vendor.

There are 2 great things about Google Optimize you have to know.

First – as a tool from Google it has native integration with Google Analytics and other Google Marketing Suit products. Thus granting  you access to rich, valuable behavioral insights as well as target segments you’ve already discovered using Analytics.

Second – keeping in place lots of services like A/B, multivariate and split testing, visual and code editing, server-side testing and segmentation – Yes, this tool is free. 

Google Optimize is especially recommended for those who are starting their experimentation journey. If you want to upgrade to enterprise level with your testing and personalization there is a paid premium version of the tool – Google Optimize 360. 

Five-Second Test

The Five-Second test is not quite an A/B testing tool, but it is an interesting free solution we decided to add here. The idea of the service is to get insights on what people catch from your website within the first 5 second impressions. Does it communicate your primary message? Does it attract attention? Try the tool to get ideas and maybe put them into your experiments as the next step.

Let’s discuss!

Do you already have experience with any of these solutions? Or are you considering which A/B Testing tool would be the best fit for your organization? 

Our professional team of CMS, DXP & Commerce experts is always ready to help with consultations and can discuss your goals with conversion rate optimization and experimentation. Talk to us today!