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The Advantage of A/B Testing With Browser Screenshots

January 17, 2019 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

When we think of web testing, we often attribute it to the role of QA professionals. However, digital marketing teams also have a lot to gain from testing different aspects of their website.

There are many ways to perform web testing in marketing, which we’ve outlined in our Marketer’s Guide to Testing.

One of the more common testing practices that marketers experiment with is A/B testing, which lets you test two scenarios at once to determine which your audience responds to better. This is done by having control and variable scenarios, which are randomly displayed to users when they visit your site.

These changes can be as small as testing the color of a CTA button to seeing whether adding a video on a landing page will increase registrations. For example, one user may see a green “Sign Up Now” button, while the other sees a red one. During an A/B test, you may look to see which one gets more clicks in order to inform which color you want to set the button to.

Just like in QA, different testing methods in marketing often require the assistance of tools. For A/B testing, Optimizely is the gold standard. Optimizely allows you to go into your page and live edit through the dashboard to make two versions of the same web page and see which performs better with site visitors.

It also keeps all your results organized so you can make informed decisions about what resonates most with customers and use data to make intelligent changes in the UI of your application.

However, while those changes may consistently look great in the Optimizely editor on the browser you’re using, it’s also worth seeing what your experiments look like outside the editor and in different environments.

With Preview Mode, you can see what your A/B tests look like across browsers and devices with the CrossBrowserTesting integration in Optimizely. This feature will load your page and take screenshots in all of the major desktop browsers including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, as well as mobile with Android and Mobile Safari.

By clicking “Cross-Browser Test” under “Preview,” you’ll be presented with thumbnails of screenshots in each browser that you can click into. This will allow you to verify that the changes from the A/B test are visually consistent, and if not, you’ll know to go back and make those changes in the editor. For more information, you can read more about how to run a cross-browser test in Optimizely.

Image via Optimizely

How do you prevent cross-browser issues in the first place? Optimizely provides a few valuable tips on using the editor so you can avoid common pitfalls. For general tips on creating a cross-compatible website, check out our eight essential tips.

A/B testing is the first step in understanding your users and what they want, but to ensure your tests are effective, it’s also important to preview those tests on different environments before going live. Collecting browser screenshots of your tests is the next step in collecting reliable data from your customers.

The Marketers’ Guide to Testing Your Website

June 18, 2018 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

Software testing has traditionally been the job of Quality Assurance teams, but as organizations realize the inherent value of a seamless online user experience, the idea of testing has also proven invaluable to other roles.

As marketing professionals evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies, tactics, and content, it’s no longer enough to blindly publish landing pages, design websites, and send emails.

By performing the following tests, marketers of all levels and ensure that the intent of their messaging matches the execution.

A/B Testing – Sometimes, it can seem like communicating with prospects can be a shot in the dark. A/B testing lets you test two scenarios at once to determine which your audience responds to better. The is often done with on web page or app to better understand how you’re communicating with your prospects. For example, if you were unsure what to write for the header on your website, you could A/B test two versions against each other to gain insights into what resonates best to capture leads and use that data choose A or B. In addition, analyzing the results of your test helps you make informed decisions that will convert leads in the future, such as the next time you have to write a page heading. Optimizely is the deluxe A/B testing tool, allowing you to go into your page and live edit through the dashboard to make tests. Optimizely keeps all your data organized, and includes value-add features such as retroactive filtering, intuitive stats engine, optimized targeting options, and saved audiences. For teams that are looking for something that will fill their more basic A/B testing needs, VWO is a comparable option.

Responsive Design Testing – Did you know that having a responsive website improves your SEO? We bet your ears just perked up. It’s true — Google prefers sites that are responsive. What does this mean for you? Basically, you need to make sure that your site works not only on desktop browsers but also on other screen sizes such as mobile and tablets. It’s not surprising the mobile use is increasing year after year, not to mention exceeding online desktop activity. While the thought of mobile-friendliness should be a no-brainer, it may not always fall on the marketer’s plate to design responsively. However, when it has a stake in your page ranking, it becomes a whole other story. Tools that provide a device lab and visual testing capabilities like CrossBrowserTesting can help give you a look at what your website looks like on those devices you don’t have access to. This is a fairly easy way to guarantee the compatibility of your site with the most popular search engine so you can make sure all that backlinking work you’ve been doing isn’t for nothing.

Email Testing – If you’re slaving over email marketing but keep seeing your open rates drop, it might not be that your copy is lacking as it is as much a lack of testing. Just like you need to make sure your website looks good on different devices, you also need to make sure your emails look good on different email servers. Unfortunately engaging email messaging isn’t always enough when Gmail and Outlook are displaying content differently — unless you stick to HTML. Litmus provides a platform that lets you build, edit, and preview your emails on over 90 different email clients (did you even know there were that many?) because the only thing worse than an email that goes out with a typo is an email that doesn’t show up at all at all. Speaking of errors, Litmus does a crawl of your email to make sure that links work, images render, and content loads so you can feel confident in every email you send out. By using a tool like Litmus, you can stop leaving your emails up to chance and spot discrepancies before you send them out to your 100,000 count subscriber list.

User Testing – What’s a better method to getting feedback on your digital experience than asking the very people whose opinions you care about most — your users? User testing is an unparalleled way to get feedback from real people on the usability of your application. When you have a website, for example, it can be difficult to put yourself in your users’ shoes and think about their needs outside of how you would want the application to look and work. User testing lets you gain insight into the user experience of someone who may not have been on your app before, and platforms like UserTesting provide you with videos of those real people giving their honest feedback on your website, mobile app, or another project of your choosing. By getting your product in front of your target audience, you can get more accurate insight into why your users perform certain actions or want things a certain way.

Performance Testing – Performance testing is fairly underrated in the marketing world, but it could be what makes or breaks the success of your application. Why spend all your time making the perfect graphics, designing the perfect layout, and writing the perfect copy if your website is going to take forever to load or crash when too many people visit? When 51 percent of online shoppers in the US say that site slowness is the top reason they’d abandon a purchase and a 2-second delay in load time during a transaction result in abandonment rates of up to 87 percent, according to Radware. It’s not just your QA team’s problem to test for performance. In fact, it’s in your best interest to see your marketing efforts succeed. Leveraging tools like LoadComplete and LoadUI will help you determine breakpoints in your application so you can get a better understanding of how fast it is and how much it can handle. Trust us — around the holidays, performance testing is a lifesaver.

Conclusion

Testing is all about checking the quality of your application, but it shouldn’t be limited to QA teams. With plenty of tools on the market, it’s becoming easier for marketers to conduct their own tests in order to optimize websites, landing pages, emails, and other content. By including testing in your marketing, you can know that your efforts are reaching a higher level of quality and trust that your messages are getting across to more users each time they interact with you online.

How Every Team Member Can Leverage a Test Automation Tool

May 24, 2018 By Alex McPeak 2 Comments

With the introduction of test automation tools such as CrossBrowserTesting, it’s easier than ever for teams to meet the demands of Agile, CI/CD, Continuous Testing, and DevOps. However, while testing used to be a job strictly for QA, software teams are finding that this no longer applies to their development process. As organizations continue to shift left, the lines continue to blur between different roles, and testers aren’t the only ones testing anymore.

If your entire team is ready to take on more testing, here’s a few ways each member can best leverage a test automation tool.

Digital Marketers – Think that your marketers have no use for testing? Think again. Anyone on your team that cares about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will likely be aware that mobile responsiveness is a factor when it comes to domain authority. In fact, Google has stated that responsive design is the recommended design pattern, which means that web applications that are optimized for mobile will actually show up higher in peoples’ search results. Your marketers may want to take advantage of a visual testing tool so that they can evaluate priority pages on different devices and screen sizes to determine whether or not they’re responsive. Ensuring mobile-friendliness will also benefit SEO by accelerating site speed, decreasing bounce rate, and boosting social sharing, making testing a marketer’s secret weapon.

Product Managers – Testing doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t) wait until the end of the SDLC. In fact, it can take place as soon as the planning stage, especially when shifting left. Product Managers can expertly use the data of past test results to influence the direction of the product, but they can also perform their own testing to make immediate improvements and determine what changes should be made in the application next. By focusing on the usability of the application, product managers can perform exploratory tests to better understand what forms could be more intuitive or determine if the site is optimized for accessibility, for example. Additionally, product managers might find value in testing newer features recently implemented by the development team that impact usability (homepage layout, checkout process, etc.) to make sure it fits into the buyer journey they way they intended.

Designers – If your designers have been manually testing your website to make sure it looks good across browsers and devices, that’s a good first step, but they shouldn’t stop there. Visual testing allows them to automatically capture screenshots of a URL on tens of browsers and compare them side-by-side. By picking a base browser, they can see where there are differences in each layout and decide which are acceptable and which need to be fixed. Whether an app is off by one pixel or a hundred, your designers can determine for themselves whether everything looks the way they want it to across configurations. It’s also important to make sure everything works in addition to looking exceptional, which is why Record & Replay helps test across the same browsers to make sure things like buttons, navigation, and link are all working as expected.

Developers – While we believe that every software development team should have it’s own dedicated QA team, that’s not to say that there are not certain times where developers should test their own code. It goes without saying that when a new feature is added, change is made, or bug is fixed the developer should ensure basic functionality of that new implementation after the code is adjusted by testing it. For longer test cases or more elaborate projects that restructure large areas of the application and require more extensive, end-to-end testing (such as you might see with a website rebrand), developers might want to also run one-off tests without taking up too much time. By leveraging prior programming knowledge to learn Selenium commands, developers can ensure functionality without spending hours on testing. Instead of manually executing a basic test case, they could write an automation script in a fraction of the time and still cover large areas of code to check whether it passes or fails.

Manual Testers – Manual testing will always be a crucial part of QA because it depends on the curiosity, observation, and skill of the individual to execute tests that will provide insight to the rest of the test. However, while exploratory tests can be the best part of the job, manual regression tests can be the bane of their existence. Despite the name of the role, manual testers no longer have to be confined to strictly manual testing. With test automation tools like Record & Replay, manual testers can automate the tedious, boring, and repetitive testing that they’ve come to dread without having to learn a programming language or getting up to speed with complex testing frameworks.

Automation Engineers – For the tester that’s mastered Selenium and has too many UI tests to count, how can they speed up testing to take it from days to hours? Parallel testing is the key to making your automation time even faster. By simultaneously testing in multiple browser configurations at once instead of one after another, parallel testing allows you to take your suite and divide the time spent running tests. Just by running a test in two browsers at once, you’re already cutting your automation time in half because you’d be testing them all at the same point in time. You can see where this would really pay off as you continue to add more tests, create longer suites, and run them on more browsers.

Conclusion

When everyone in the SDLC is moving fast to implement and deliver new features, testing is no longer a one-man job. In order for other team members to meet their deadlines, they must also be held accountable for some of their own testing.

While we can never replace the important work of our QA teams, there are tools that can help ensure that everyone plays a part in ensuring speed and quality from planning to deployment.