Adaptive Testing: The Superior A/B Test for HubSpot Users

Of all the different sets of hats marketers wear, there is one in particular that makes them similar to scientists – conducting experiments! While marketers may not have white lab coats on, they do conduct tests and try different content and designs to find out what makes the audiences tick.

Experimentation is a powerful tool in a marketer’s toolkit, where you run tests on your content to identify what resonates best with your audience. This experimentation has a huge impact on your bottom line.

Until now, you would’ve probably played around with A/B tests on landing pages, CTAs, forms, etc, but now it’s time to embrace the new and improved A/B testing – Adaptive Page Testing — an AI-driven test by HubSpot.

Adaptive testing offers a powerful way for users to experiment with the content and design of their website to optimize traffic and improve conversion rates.

Let’s understand more about it.

What is Adaptive Testing?

Adaptive testing, formerly called the multi-armed bandit testing, by HubSpot, allows you to see how different changes to your page can affect its performance. With adaptive testing, you can test a lot of things at once and see how every change to your content or page design influences its performance.

HubSpot’s adaptive testing is backed by artificial intelligence and machine learning and is available in all Marketing Hub Enterprise accounts. In addition to this, adaptive testing works for multi-language pages as well.

Why is Adaptive Testing Important for Marketers?

When you conduct A/B testing, you have to do things manually to get statistical insights. Also, you have to analyze the statistical data over a long period of time to choose which variation was the ‘ultimate winner’. And until that time arrives, the variations for your landing pages, CTAs, or forms will remain live on your site, which means half of your visitors would see the lower-performing version, which can impact your conversions. Let’s take a look at all the benefits that adaptive testing has for marketers.

1. Automatic

With adaptive testing, you don’t have to wait for a specific sample size before you manually select a winner for each test run like in A/B testing. You just have to add your variations and wait for the test to produce results. This means – no more manual set-up or monitoring, which leaves marketers with plenty of time to explore and create awesome campaigns.

2. Multiple Variations

While A/B testing only allows testing two variations at a time, adaptive testing allows you to test up to five variations at a time, which means you can test more ideas and HubSpot will automatically show visitors the variation that performs the best over time.

3. Traffic Distribution Over Time

After your test is complete, you can view the results in the form of a graph. Generally, it shows how your variations at the initial point receive roughly the same amount of traffic.

However, after a certain period of time, the testing model learns which variation is performing the best and receiving more traffic, and it automatically allocates more traffic to that variation.

How to Use HubSpot Adaptive Testing

Now that you know what adaptive testing is, here are a few easy steps for you to take when you are ready to conduct your first adaptive test in HubSpot:

• Go to HubSpot’s CMS Page Editor and click on ‘Run a Test’ and when the dialog box appears, choose the adaptive test option on the right.

• Set your goal and then add the number of variations to the test. You can add up to five variations. Ensure that you give each variation a unique name that is descriptive.

• Edit your variations to change different aspects of each one until they are relevant. For instance, you can experiment with the length of your form. You can either add more fields to ask for more information or keep it short.
• Once you are done editing your variations, click on ‘Publish’ to publish your pages.

Voila! You’re done.

• Now, all you have to do is analyze your test results. After your test has run for a sufficient period of time, data from all page variations will appear in your ‘test results’ tab. You’ll get three primary charts to help you understand your results.

– The ‘goal metric comparison’ graph that determines which variation best accomplished your goal using a comparison graph.
– The ‘traffic distribution’ graph that reveals how traffic was allocated to the different variations over time.

– The ‘comprehensive table’ that reveals all metrics for every variation in the test.

Unlike other things in marketing, adaptive tests follow the “set it and forget it” approach. If you don’t end a test; it runs forever, optimizing performance over time. However, if you don’t wish to continue the test, you can end the test yourself by clicking ‘end test’ and choosing your winning variation.

Accurate and smart testing of your content or design can truly help you meet your goals and that’s where adaptive testing can be your ally.

Should you want to know more about the amazing things you can do with HubSpot, drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll take it from there.