Multivariate Testing vs. A/B Testing: Comparison and Benefits
Published on Jun 20, 2023
by Vijay Singh Khatri
When building an application for the first time, you should know about A/B and multivariate testing. Both are used for mobile application and website testing and have advantages and disadvantages. If you don’t know about the individual mobile or website testing methods individually, utilizing any of them would be problematic. For starters, we often consider which testing would be beneficial to enhance your business’s conversion rate. Moreover, if you experiment with sequential A/B and multivariate testing, your app will stand out among your competitors. Multivariate testing is more used to test your app’s homepage, while A/B testing is preferred for your application’s features and functions testing. But knowing how and when your app would require multivariate and A/B testing is hard.
We have explained the key differences between A/B and multivariate testing to help you understand and decide which resting would benefit your organization.
What is Multivariate Testing?
Multivariate testing refers to testing more than one element of your website or mobile application in real time. In other words, multivariate testing is running multiple A/B testing simultaneously on your mobile application sites. However, A/B tests are more straightforward, but multivariate testing is more complex and takes a little bit more time to complete. With multivariate A/B testing, you can track changes you have made to your app every time you release a new update. Multivariate testing utilizes changes in multiple variables; it uses combinations of several variables to create more designs in the element you are testing.
Multivariate testing requires research and knowledge, but it works as a great tool when you are in the early stage of application development.
For instance, you can test different ideas for every design element on your mobile app’s user interface, including call-to-action texts, information that the user’s information when signing up for your platform, and more. Multivariate testing will test these elements and provide you with the results you want to enhance to make your app better. Overall, the only goal of multivariate testing is to find different combinations of variants and elements that greatly impact your mobile application, whether or not they are negative or positive on the user experience. Multivariate testing helps identify the most effective combination for achieving a specific goal, such as increasing click-through rates or improving sales, by comparing the performance of different combinations.
Multivariate testing has two types, and developers use each depending on their requirements.
Types of Multivariate Testing
When developers use multivariate testing for testing their mobile applications, they utilize two approaches:
Full Factorial: This method is initially referred to as multivariate testing. It allows you to test multiple variables assigned to 20% of your traffic. In this method, the combinations and variables are put together and tested individually as the same part of your app’s traffic. This method can be time-consuming when dealing with large variables.
Fractional Factorial: A fraction of all elements will be tested in fractional factorial multivariate testing on your mobile app. That's why fractional factorial multivariate testing tends to be less accurate but requires less traffic.
Multivariate testing seems impactful for mobile application testing but doesn’t forget that they come with pros and cons, like everything.
When to Use Multivariate Testing?
Multivariate testing covers vast usage fields: product development and marketing, user experience optimization, etc. Multivariate testing can be beneficial in the following scenarios:
Website Optimization: Multivariate testing helps identify the effective combination of elements to improve website performance, increasing conversion and click-through rates. Different combinations of elements such as headlines, CTA, layouts, and images are tested in this case.
Email Marketing: Multivariate testing can optimize email marketing campaigns by testing various subject lines, content variations, and designs. Using this technique lets marketers determine the impact of different elements.
Landing Page Optimization: The landing page of your website promoting any campaign or product can be tested by changing headlines, images, forms, and other page elements to maximize conversions.
Advertisements: Various ad creatives, headlines, ad copies, and call-to-action can be tested using multivariate testing to optimize ad campaigns to determine the most effective combination of generating clicks and conversions.
Product Pricing and Packaging: Multivariate testing can test different pricing options, packaging designs, and messaging to determine an attractive and compelling offer when launching a new product or service.
User Experience Testing: Multivariate testing can help evaluate the impact of different website layouts, navigation structures, and content organizations on user engagement, satisfaction, and task completion rates.
Pros and Cons of Multivariate Testing
Most developers Run A/B testing first on their mobile application, then use the result to run MVT testing on them. For example, you are testing your user interface on your application, and you find out that the navigation menu is the winner in the A/B test and has no flaws. Now you can run an MVT test to find out if the navigation menu of your interface was that good. If the MVT test shows a problem, you can fix it for a better user experience. With A/B testing, you will not know the interactions between different variables on a single section of your mobile application. However, with MVT, you can find every detail about every element and redesign them whenever you want to create a great impact on your mobile application. So, the pros and cons of multivariate testing are simple:
Advantages of Multivariate Testing
Can easily test different variables.
Understand the elements of individual sections of the mobile app to create a better conversion rate.
Provide you with more analyzed data for better application performance.
Needs more traffic to transfer a mathematical significance.
Offers flexibility when it comes to changing the design and layout of your application.
Limitations of Multivariate Testing
Requires more variable combinations than A/B while testing.
Requires a significant amount of traffic to reach statistical significance.
The test setup’s restrictions are less flexible for marketing creativity.
This is everything about multivariate testing for your mobile application. Now it's time to find out about A/B testing as well and later will keep an eye on the comparison list of multivariate testing and Ab testing for mobile applications.
What is A/B Testing?
There are different types of A/B testing that developers perform depending on the structure of their application. A/B testing on mobile applications involves running different but simultaneous experiments between multiple page variables or user interface variables to see which works best. For instance, you can create two different headlines for your page, and running an A/B test will help you understand which one performs the best and attracts your target users to create a better conversion rate significantly. The headline results in more engagement will be the best option for your content. In other words, the A/B test is like a scientist that helps you experiment with your users’ interests based on the data they provide, and it helps you determine how your marketing activities will be and how they will attract more users of the same kind.
How Many Types of AB Testings Are There?
Now that you know what A/B testing for mobile applications is, it's time to move ahead and discover the different testing methods developers use to test their mobile applications.
Split URL testing: Split URL testing and mobile app A/B testing differ. Split URL testing is done on the new version of an existing and new web page URL to determine which works better. Most of the time, split URL testing is unimportant for mobile application testing because it is vastly related to website development.
Multivariate testing (MVT): Multivariate testing is also a part of mobile application A/B testing. Multivariate testing is more complex than simple A/B testing. It refers to an experimentation method for the variables of different application sections that are analyzed simultaneously to determine which works the best.
Multipage testing: Multipage testing is also a type of experimentation. You can track and test the modifications you have made toa particular element across multiple sections or pages in your mobile application.
All these types of mobile app ab testing have advantages and disadvantages; now it's time to find out what those are.
When to Use A/B Testing?
A/B testing technique compares two versions of a webpage or app to observe which version performs better and achieves user engagement and conversion rates. A/B testing can be useful in the following scenarios:
Website and App Redesign: A/B test can help determine the impact of the new design of your application compared to the old design as it compares two versions of any website and application. This way, we can determine which version is more effective for achieving the desired goal.
Conversion Optimization: A/B testing helps with testing different elements of an application, such as headlines, CTA, buttons, or forms, to evaluate which leads to better and higher conversion rates.
Landing Page Optimization: Since A/B testing compares two versions of a webpage or app, it can be used to compare landing pages for marketing campaigns. Using A/B testing, we can compare two different versions of landing pages to analyze which generates more leads to sales.
Pricing and Promotion: A/B testing can help evaluate various pricing strategies and promotional offers offering different range pricing or different offers on two different versions; we can determine which version maximizes revenue and customer engagement.
Content Optimization: Content is a game changer when generating leads or getting conversions. A/B testing helps compare versions of content such as headlines, email subject lines, product descriptions, and more that resonate with the targetted audience better, leading to higher engagement.
UX/UI Improvement: The overall usability of your website and user experience must be smooth to drive conversions. A/B testing can facilitate this by testing various interface elements such as navigation menus, layouts, and button requirements.
Mobile App Optimization: A/B testing helps draw more user engagement and retention for mobile apps by testing user flow and design features for a smooth user experience.
Pros and Cons of A/B Testing
Pros
Shows accurate evidence: A/B testing for mobile applications always looks out for user behaviors such as which product they are buying, their budget, what kind of products they like, etc. Therefore, it helps determine the right target audience and provides them with their choice of products.
Finds new ideas: If you have a new idea for a new feature or function of your mobile application, then you can test that Idea with A/B testing and find out if that works. However, before you test the idea, you must implement that with hard code on your application.
Optimize one element at a time: If you run a large mobile application or a group of mobile applications, then with API testing, you can easily test the apps by starting with small elements before you test the whole main interface of the application. However, this approach has a small downside: you couldn't afford to play with your existing visitors or mobile app users by giving them an experience that might not be the final.
Answers specific questions about designs: When testing your mobile application user experience, you might wonder which color is the best for your layout for a particular design, such as a CTA button. You can play around with red, yellow, green, or many other colors, but you wouldn't be able to determine the best without running an A/B test. This is the best option for finding out how to slowly improve your app with good placements of buttons, layout, colors, fonts, images, and more.
Cons
Takes a lot of time and resources: A/B testing takes a long time to set up than multivariate testing. Setting up this process can take a lot of resources, time, and third-party services, which might be costly for small businesses.
Only works for specific goals: A/B testing is only good for solving a specific problem, such as which layout is best for this interface. But if your goal is hard, like testing a particular element on your website as multivariate testing does, then A/B testing is.
Does not improve a failed work: A/B testing does provide an accurate result of your mobile application, but the testing does not reveal the type of flaw your mobile application has. For example, it does not reveal why your user got frustrated in the first place, and that's why developers are unable to pick up the real problem for their users’ disappointment. Improving the failed work looks difficult since it does not provide detailed results.
Requires constant testing: When the test is over, you cannot do anything with that data, but you will have to do another test from the new baseline once the changes are made.
These are the pros and cons of A/B testing for mobile applications; if you compare it with multivariate testing, you will find the following result.
Key Differences of Multivariate and A/B Testing
Learning about multivariate and A/B testing for your mobile application was the first idea; now it's time to discover their key differences.
1. Combinations of Variations
Since developers use multivariate testing to test different combinations of variations of a mobile application, it is considered a more complex version of an A/B test. In a multivariate test, many combinations of variables can be compared with each other. Moreover, in this context, you can also test how variables communicate on the interface or a section of the application or website that is not applicable with an A/B test.
2. Number of Test Pages
With an A/B test, you can only test between two versions of an interface. However, multivariate tests allow you to test dozens of other interface or web page versions because different variable combinations are testable here.
3. Traffic Needs
Your mobile application or website to be equally divided between interfaces or web pages for both ab and multivariate testing. This means if you want to get a statistically important result through your multivariate test, it can have different interface versions, which require more traffic than you would need in an A/B testing. Because A/B testing always has only two interface versions.
4. The Time Needed for Getting the Results
Since there are only two versions to test in A/B testing, it will take less time to provide you with the result. Depending on your traffic and the number of variables you are testing with multiple tests, it can take months to complete the test and provide you with the result.
Similarities Between Multivariate and A/B Testing
Multivariate testing and A/B testing are statistical techniques and experiments to determine and analyze the impact of changes or variations on a specific outcome. Here are some similarities between the two techniques:
Carry Controlled Experimental Approach: Both methods are conducted as controlled experiments where certain variations and elements are added and compared to measure the impact towards targetted goal.
Comparison of Elements: Both methods are designed to observe and compare the different versions and determine which performs better. However, A/B testing involves two versions, and multivariate testing, on the other hand, compares multiple variations and tests them simultaneously,
Statistical Analysis: A/B testing and multivariate testing are statistical techniques and rely on statistical analysis to determine the significance of the results. Both methods use this technique to analyze and assess if the observed difference in the performance between variations is statistically significant are confirmed and not by chance.
Goal Oriented: Both methods are used to achieve a certain goal or metric. They aim at identifying the best version that helps achieving their goals such as improved user engagement, CTR, and higher conversion.
Iterative Process: Both are iterative processes involving making incremental changes based on the results of previous experiments.
Data-Drive Decision Making: Both techniques rely on data to make decisions. The testing results provides data that helps determine the impact and hence, guide with further decision making process on choosing the version to achieve the goals and get targetted results,
Conclusion
Overall, both multivariate and A/B testing are beneficial for testing a mobile application. And multivariate testing is a part of A/B testing. Suppose you need more time to complete the testing methodologies of your application or website. In that case, you might go for A/B testing since it provides results almost immediately, and you can prepare for another test. But if you have more variables to test for on your mobile application, then going for a multivariate test will be the best option, even though it could take months to complete and provide you with the result. But you can use both multivariate testing and A/B testing together. In that case, you can optimize your specific mobile app structure along with email marketing or advertising campaigns at the same time. This saves your time and helps you build your conversion rate by giving complete user satisfaction.