Forms are an essential part of the conversion process. They can earn you more customers, but if they’re not well-optimized, they can easily frustrate users and cause them to abandon ship. 

A/B testing arms you with data to back your decisions about how you set up your forms. Let’s take a look at how split testing can help you ensure you're avoiding pitfalls in the conversion process.

What is A/B Testing?

Even though there’s no magic formula to improve website conversion rates, A/B testing helps you build a stronger online form. 

A/B testing is a statistical method of testing certain variations in a group of subjects and measuring their effects on a given result. 

For digital marketing, this can be testing a landing page or form against another (or two or three), and then measuring their effectiveness in attracting sign-ups. But A/B testing can also dig much deeper, allowing you to test individual elements of the form like text, CTA buttons, image sizes, and even colors. 

It can be tempting to test everything (“Would more users convert if the form was a different color?” “Would online form completion increase if I changed the font?”), but before you become overwhelmed with options, come up with a list of the top elements you think could impact your form conversion rate.

Elements of Form Optimization

1. Length. Shortening your form can be a game-changer. (The average survey contains 22 form fields.) Do you know how many users abandon your form because it’s too much trouble? Find out by creating a shorter version to A/B test alongside the original. While there’s no standard for perfect form length, you can experiment to see what your users prefer most. Assess your current fields by classifying them by importance. Some might be essential (like email address), while others are optional (like job title). Let the categorizations guide you as to what to cut. 
2. Submit Button Copy. The submit button is often overlooked in form building. But small changes to the text can have surprising results. One study shows that just changing button text from second person (“your free guide”) to first person (“my free guide”) resulted in a 90% increase in clicks. Try everything from wording to font size to color. It may be a small swap that can lead to big improvements to your conversion rate.
3. Field Bottlenecks. Field bottlenecks are fields that keep a user from completing and submitting a form. For example, you might require users to enter their phone numbers, resulting in a high bottleneck rate if they’re reluctant to give it. Test for bottlenecks, and consider removing them if possible. If you think the requested information isn’t the problem, then perhaps the copy is confusing. Try rewording or adding subtext to explain how you’ll use the responses. 
4. Design. Test various sizes of the same image to see which one your users prefer most. Or, experiment with video. Data shows conversions increase by 86% when video is used.

What Else Can You Test?

Further optimize your forms by trying these additional landing page optimization tactics:

1. Experiment with killer headlines. 
Pinpoint the copy that snags your visitors’ attention and keeps them scrolling.
2. Add trust indicators. Trust indicators are examples of your trustworthiness as a business, including social proof, certifications/awards, notable clients, and anything else that increases visitors’ belief in your legitimacy. Test your trust indicators to see what satisfies your audience. 
3. Nail your call to action.
 Don’t forget the ask. Be sure to “seal the deal” at the end of your page to get visitors to complete the action you’re hoping for (submit, get a demo, learn more, etc.). Test different phrases on your buttons to see how visitors react.
4. Test opposing page elements. 
In addition to text, copy, and format, play around with elements on the page that affect readability and conversion likelihood. Try navigation vs. no navigation, play around with bullets vs. no bullets, and reconsider what elements you’ve placed above the fold.

Benefits of A/B Testing

As marketers, we love metrics. But bosses love the bottom line. What’s great about split testing is that it can help you: 

Boost ROI. ‍

A/B testing can help you boost ROI so long as your goals are connected to the long-term goals set out by the business. Plus, it saves money on traffic you already have. You’re not increasing traffic spend; you’re just working to improve assets you already have.  

Use data to drive decision-making. ‍

Put aside ego and let data drive the decision-making. Test conflicting ideas and see what users actually think. 

Better understand your audience.‍

A/B testing can also help you understand your audience and how the form/landing page really works for particular visitors. If you’re using a website optimizer, make sure the data can be connected into your analytics platform. 

How to Improve Conversion Rates with A/B Testing

Not sure where to start with A/B testing? Remember these best practices as you set out:

1. One test at a time. Science class taught us to test only one variable in order to draw the most accurate conclusions. The same concept applies to A/B testing. Choose the most important form element to test and be patient. You can always test another element at a later time.
2. Be patient. Depending on your web traffic, you may have to wait a while to compile enough results to draw a conclusion. So, don’t pull the plug after only a handful of responses—the more visits you track, the more accurate your test will be. In general, form A/B testing best practices call for at least 100 visitors/users per variation. However, context is key. If you’re A/B testing a very important page, you might need a lot more visitors to acquire the most telling data. 
3. Analyze your findings. Once you have your test results, evaluate them carefully. Just because a shorter form gets more conversions doesn’t mean it’s the best choice. You might discover that the shorter form actually results in fewer qualified leads. In that case, you might actually need the data a longer form provides, even at the expense of higher conversions. Go back to your original goal, and be sure the actions you take support it.

A Quick Note...

‍Is it a structural problem or an offer problem? If it’s an offer problem, you probably won’t be able to A/B test your way out of poor conversion rates. Instead, you’ll need to reassess the deliverable or promise you’re providing behind the form. But if it’s structural in nature, you can test (and arrive at a better layout) for any element on the page. 

A/B Testing Tools

There are two ways to test your forms:

1. Use a tool like Google Analytics. This lets you redirect your visitor’s browser to a new page that contains the form you’d like to test, almost instantly (so the user most likely won’t notice!). With a redirect, you’re testing two different forms head-to-head.
2. Another option is to use a paid A/B testing tool like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer. These services dynamically change the way a form appears in the user’s browser. One advantage of an A/B testing tool is that it will track and measure your conversions. Plus, most of them don’t require any coding knowledge.

A Note on Data Significance...

How trustworthy are the A/B test results you collect? Many programs already have significance calculations built in to their A/B testing. But some will give you results too early into the test. Run your tests over a few business cycles to account for traffic fluctuation. 

Common Mistakes of A/B Testing

Is it possible to get too trigger happy in your testing? Yes. Make a plan before you act to avoid these common pitfalls:

1. Stopping a test too early. This typically happens as a result of being excited about a test you’re running and possibly because a significance calculator is (incorrectly) telling you the data is trustworthy. But stopping a test too early can create a “false positive.” Perhaps there’s an outlying variable creating false results. It’s always best to just let the test run according to your pre-defined timeframe.
2. Testing too many variables at once. Even though changes in multiple variables can temporarily result in increased traffic, they can also have a bad impact on your A/B testing and bring down changes that would normally be positive. If you test a new page headline and an image, how will you know which variable most greatly impacted the results? By focusing on one variable at a time, you’ll know exactly why it resulted positively or negatively when the test is finished. 
3. Testing the wrong things. The sky’s the limit when it comes to A/B testing. But sometimes, you can focus too much on things that don’t really matter to your visitors and won’t make a big impact on your website. In that way, you waste time (and money) testing variables that won’t produce higher conversions in the end. 

Get More Submissions with Optimized Forms

You might be surprised by the results you receive with A/B testing. Regardless of what you find to be true, your marketing team will be armed with hard data to inform their decisions instead of relying on hunches.

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