My “Must Try” List of A/B Testing Tools – Compared

My “Must Try” List of A/B Testing Tools – Compared

The “Must Try” List of A/B Testing Tools – Compared
A/B testing has become so pervasive that data nerds (that’s us) are using it to optimize their dating profiles. Let’s see if the profile picture with me wearing my favorite blue shirt while petting my dog gets more clicks and emails.

You know, in direct comparison with the beach picture where it looks like I took a bath in tanning oil. It was only half a bottle! There were cervezas involved. No kidding. It happens. Don’t judge.

Long before people started doing conversion optimization to get more dates, bloggers got really good at using A/B testing tools too. More sign-ups, sales, and CPC ad clicks.

The results are too good not to try. And if you didn’t, then you’ve been losing out on conversions and earnings.

Our 12 favorite A/B testing tools
Unbounce

Unbounce provides us a variety of professionally designed templates to create a landing page. They are responsive designs that work for mobile too. And the A/B testing functionality is built in.

Pricing: Starts at $49 per month.
Visual Website Optimizer by Wingify
VWO calls itself the “A/B Testing Software for Marketers”. Of course, if you’re using any A/B testing software, whether you like it or not, you’re acting like a marketer. Don’t worry. That’s a good thing. Marketers get results.

Wingify’s team built a full gamut product with features that go far beyond the basics of A/B testing. If you’re new to conversion optimization and testing, start out with the basic A/B testing components first. You can take advantage of the rest as you get more familiar with VWO.

Pricing: Starts at $49 per month.
Google Analytics Experiments
There are some undeniable advantages of being a $400,000,000,000 company like Google. One of them is the complete freedom to hire as many geniuses as needed. And it results in Google software at or near the top of lists like these. Maybe a little bit like the USA and the olympic medal count, or Canadians who dominate slapshots and beaver tattoos.

Pricing: Comes with Google Analytics so if you don’t pay for GA you won’t pay for GA experiments.
Convert
Another great name. No beating around the bush here. There’s no mistaking the objective with Convert. However, they are targeted at the Enterprise market and won’t be suitable for some lower trafficked blogs. Convert boasts flicker free tests. This is actually an important feature.

Pricing: Starts at $125 per month

TruConversion

Opportunity! We like to keep a watchful eye out for new products. TruConversion is one of them. It’s (very) similar to one of our other products on the list (HotJar) and bids itself as an “all-in-one analytics and feedback application”. The opportunity here is if you can get in on their beta you’ll receive the full enterprise package free for a whole year. Not bad.

Pricing: Free while in beta

A/Bingo

If you’re not a coder, you might want to skip over A/Bingo. However, it’s growing in popularity as its a plugin written for the highly popular Ruby on Rails development framework. If your site is built on top of Rails, there may be some potential here for you.

Pricing: Free
Five Second Test
Five seconds may seem like a short time, but in fact it is more than enough time for a website visitor to determine if there is enough quality in your website to stay, or to leave potentially never to return.

It’s a novel way to collect user feedback. You prepare a mockup of your site or page, ask some questions, and then get feedback from real users. They have 5-seconds to see it. Then they are presented with questions. And Five Second Test probes them for answers to understand what they recall and what left the biggest impression.

Pricing: Basic is free and a pro package costs $99 per month.
Optimizely
Optimizely is probably the best known A/B testing solution of the bunch. Best of all, for most users, it’s free for life with a pretty decent set of features that will do nicely for most A/B tests.

Pricing: Free with most features. More robust packages are most likely priced according to page views.

HotJar
Not branded as an A/B testing tool but the functionality is there among some other really great features like heatmaps, visitor recording, conversion funnels, and more.

One thing you need to keep in mind with HotJar is that the data you will be provided is sampled (just like Google Analytics started doing recently). This allows HotJar to offer very competitive pricing but you don’t get all of your data and need to rely on HotJar’s algorithms to provide you with accurate sampling.

Pricing: Free with data sampling. Paid packages start at $29
AB Tasty
A good user experience is one born through continuous testing and AB Tasty try to provide their users with all the tools necessary not just to convert but also to create a great user experience that really connects with end users.

They also offer a DMP (data management platform) integration to really put your data to good use.

Pricing: Starts at $34 per month.
AdNgin (shameless plug)

If you’re a digital publisher, we’ve saved the best for last. We’re going to have to suspend a little modesty just this one time. While the other A/B testing tools we’ve showcased are more focused on content optimization, AdNgin is unique. We’re fully focused on maximizing your ad earnings through continuous testing.

That’s right, AdNgin does not modify content. Instead it allows you to experiment with Google AdSense layout like placement, size, device, and much more. It isn’t just about changing the layout of your ads though. We also help you test across different ad networks.

Enjoy the full post

Choosing an a/b testing tool isn’t easy. This post will help you make an informed choice that will impact your bottom line