What is AB Testing?
AB Testing is an experimentation process to compare two or more versions of a webapp, webpage, element etc against each other to analyze which version performs better. The different versions are randomly shown to the users and data is collected for a conversion goal to understand the performance of each version.
How a new version is served to the users?
We use a third party cloud service like optimizely, vwo or google optimize etc to create a new version/variation in the browser while the page is loading. As these alterations and changes are done in the visitors’ browser, instead of the server, therefore, it is termed as client-side a/b testing.
These cloud services or tools provides a user interface to create an AB Test experiment or campaign.
Setup an AB Test Tool or cloud service
This is generally done by clients development team themselves. To integrate the website with an AB Testing tool, a JS script (provided by the tool) is added in the global header of the website in the head section(to avoid flickers). This script connects the website or webapp to the AB Test tool with a unique key i.e. account id or site code. Every time a page loads, the script makes a call to the tool’s server and fetch all the campaign data or settings to execute the campaigns.
AB Testing tools
There are a lot of AB Testing tools in the market and we mostly work with these 6 tools
General flow of code execution
- Global code
- Targeting conditions
- Audience Check
- Variation and Shared Code
