As an Internet marketer, you know the importance of A/B testing. Comparing the successes of control samples or variables can inform your advertising, marketing, emails, and landing pages. You can and should be testing everything – from copy text to layout design, images to color choice. Usually, to perform a split test or A/B test, you had to arrange for link tracking and click-throughs, and gauge the responses yourself – sometime even crunching the numbers. Now there’s a plugin for WordPress sites that can handle it for you.

ShrimpTest Plugin

Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (or Mitcho) is the creator of ShrimpTest, the A/B testing plugin project. He’s a MIT student, who used to work for Mozilla Labs, so he’s got the credibility to create such a complex formula.
And ShrimpTest is complex – but not for the user. It’s in keeping with the WordPress approach so it’s easy to learn and use. It’s in the first version, but there are a few upgrades and changes Erlewine wants to make. He’s also opened the project up, explaining the development and process of the plugin on his ShrimpTest blog, http://shrimptest.wordpress.com.
He’s responsive to user feedback, and eager to talk metrics, scores and tracking. He recently posted a progress report on the plugin, and it was full of info you need to know.

Here’s How A/B Testing Works…

A/B testing involves picking an item or element to test, selecting the control, and then creating a variable. You want to test an element that is tied to an action. For example, you can test the placement of an image on a sales page, to see if placing a big picture of the item front and center results in more clicks, than keeping the picture below the title and descriptive sentence.

Remember, you pick ONE element to test, the more specific you can get (while still having significance) the better.

And Here’s How the ShrimpTest Works…

Erlewine wants the ShrimpTest plugin to be pretty seamless, so he’s made sure that it interfaces with WordPress Super Cache and the AP Admin Bar plugin. Using the plugin you can create experiments (A/B tests); assign random visitors to the variants (split the traffic between the control and variable versions) and record metrics, so you can see the results of the testing.

You can test PHP Application Programming Interface (API) for themes and other plugins, and you can use an A/B short code, [a/b] to test elements you select. You would insert the [a/b] short code with the element in the HMTL script of the page you’re testing.

You can also select the metric – which is the result you want to improve. It’s the action that is impacted by the element. In the current model, Erlewine has set the metric to conversions, to you can track the conversions related to your A/B test.

ShrimpTest in Action

You can see a demo of the plugin on the ShrimpTest site. Erlewine takes you through setting up an A/B test for text, using ‘donate’ as a control and ‘pay me’ as the variable. He also shows an example of an experiment he’s been running for some time, testing the size of the ‘donate’ button.

Currently, ShrimpTest uses Z-Score to rate the test results. A Z-Score compares the raw score with the mean, or standard score, and calculates the importance or weight of the results. Erlewine would like to adjust this in the future, to make it a bit more user-friendly and show beyond the z-score how the testing results are significant.

Test the Tester Yourself

ShrimpTest version 0.1 is available for download, at the ShrimpTest site or at tinyurl.com/shrimptest-0-1. Test it out with your site, and see how you can improve your pages. There’s no studying required for this test, and the results can really boost your revenue!