What is Mobile App A/B Testing? Types & Best Practices
Published on Jul 1, 2023
by Simran Arora
When you build your first mobile application for your new business, you need to do everything you can to make it stand out. Among all the elements, A/B testing is a crucial component. In today’s highly competitive market, thorough testing of your newly developed software is essential for attracting users. To improve your business’s conversion rate, make the mobile app credible to the user's eyes. Every time you change your mobile app, it might affect your conversion rate. That's why A/B testing is the best option for app owners. We will talk about what A/B testing is in this post and its benefits, types, best practices, and more.
What is Mobile App Testing?
The number of mobile app development has been growing over the years; that's why you need to test your mobile app every time the developer releases a new update. Moreover, releasing new updates every day or regularly is a part of your safe software development because it increases user satisfaction, converting into a good conversion rate.
However, constantly delivering a good app experience to the users is tricky because you would not know what features are doing the best with every update you release. Advanced A/B testing for mobile applications will list all the desired metrics and open many opportunities for your application development and business growth.
Mobile app A/B testing is slightly different from standard A/B testing because it focuses more on the app's user interface and unlocks the opportunity you could take to optimize the user experience. In short words, mobile app testing or A/B testing helps you to enhance your user experience by launching, testing, and comprehensively optimizing your app's features and interface. But not all mobile app API testing works the same way, and there are different types of Ab testing that you should know.
What Are the Different Types of Mobile App Testing?
Developers and app marketers use two kinds of mobile app AB testing. Both types have only one principle: to make a positive impact on the audience, but they have different functions.
In-app A/B Testing
In-app ab testing helps the developers track the app's UX and UI changes. The metrics involve session times, retention rates, user engagement, and other relevant things. Different metrics depend on different functions of the app, and testing the features individually, will help the developers find out how the features are working and how they are impacting the users positively or negatively.
A/B Testing for App Marketing Campaigns
A/B testing for mobile applications is also applicable in marketing campaigns. For example, app marketers use A/B testing to optimize their conversion rates, target users, and drive them to install their applications. With the help of mobile app API testing, app marketers target which ad campaign will work for a new target audience. That helps them create the best advertisement campaign for their potential users, eventually increasing conversion rates.
Now that we talked about different types of mobile application A/B testing, it's also important to know which part of the mobile application developers test.
What to Test for in Mobile Applications with AB Testing?
We have previously mentioned two types of mobile app ab testing: one is in-app A/B testing, and the other is app marketing campaigns A/B testing. These types have several different parts to test for, which we will now talk about in this section.
Different Parts to Test In-app A/B Testing
Messaging: It does not matter if you are making a messenger or a new gaming app, messaging is unquestionably the most important aspect of your mobile application development. In mobile application A/B testing, there are different ways you can run tests on your application that will help you understand whether the way your app is delivering and receiving messages is right or not. However, messaging does not mean texting another person or a customer support team. Messaging could also mean new rewards popups that appear right after you achieve your mobile game application. It could also mean a subscription prompt that users get after registering with their email address or paying to any platform.
Layout: Your application's layout is the first thing your visitor or user notices, so your application's layout needs to be perfect all the time. With AB testing, you will find many aspects of your application's layout or user interface that you might want to change or improve to boost user experience.
UI Copy: User interface copy or UI copy refers to the CTA, aka call-to-action texts, captions of the product, descriptions of the product, or the headlines that you use to promote the product. It would help if you always focused on creating more engaging or crispy things to catch users' attention. With mobile app testing, you will understand whether your app is doing the right thing in the user copy aspect, whether your app is encouraging enough for the user to boost your conversion rate.
Other things: Other things in in-app A/B testing involve tracking the user flow, subscription flow, onboarding flow, checkout flow, and more. A/B testing will help you keep track of the users coming and going out of your mobile applications, how many new users are subscribing to your channel, how many are buying new products, and what kind of products they are buying; these all are also a part of your mobile app A/B testing technique. A/B testing also tests the push notification feature of an application. This will help you determine whether or not the app is sending the right notification to the user at the right time in the right way without being too intrusive.
Different Parts to Test in Marketing Campaigns
While user interface, layouts, and all are a part of in-app mobile app testing, headline, and copyediting, CTA texts are part of marketing campaigns for mobile apps. Let's check out the aspects of the mobile application development marketing plan that the A/B testing covers.
Headlines and Copyediting
Your headlines and the content you publish on your applications regarding the products and services that you provide are the first and most important things that your users look up to. If those things don't stand out from the others or your competitors, then you wouldn't be able to keep your visitors and users stuck around. With A/B testing, you can determine how your headlines and content editing plans are going.
Call-to-action Texts
Your call to action texts needs to convince the visitors or the users to purchase a certain product. If your call-to-action or CTA texts are not up to mark, then you couldn't be able to convert those visitors into customers. With A/B testing, you can easily determine if your CTA texts are convincing enough to purchase your products or keep using your application.
Depth of the Content
How much content or information you provide to the users or your potential customers is important to determine when running a marketing campaign. With mobile app A/B testing, you can easily determine if your content is deep enough to increase your conversion rate. The same thing goes for product descriptions and the subject lines you use to promote a product.
When developers run A/B testing on their mobile app, they determine the best practices of the campaign from beforehand. Let's see what the best practices of mobile app A/B testing are.
Best Practices for Mobile App Testing
Here now, we will discuss the best practices of mobile app Ab testing.
Research
In the case of Mobile app ab testing, the first important aspect that developers need to cover is developing a hypothesis. Researching and analyzing the available data allows you to decide the testing variables. e.g., Building an eCommerce website showcasing a minimum number of products while the users open the website is a great way to increase the session time. Now, this is a hypothesis that is formulated through research.
Determine the App's Motive
The developers need to determine what the app will bring to the table and how it is going to benefit the users. Then with A/B testing, the developers will be able to bring out most of the features to serve their users.
Conduct the A/B Test
After researching and determining the app's motive, developers conduct the test to determine the drawbacks or space for improvements in the application. Performing this kind of test will help the developers determine which app version is most suitable for the users.
Analyze the Test Results and Review Them
Ab testing is all about rechecking and reverifying whether the data is correct. There are many metrics that the A/B test result show, such as how many users are spending time on your app, how many are referring your app to their friends, and more. These kinds of results and metrics will help you find out how your app is doing and whether or not there is more you can do to make it better.
Make Changes Based on the Results
Since you have done the test, you will also prepare yourself for making the changes based on the results it provides. This is where creating the best version of the app comes from.
Prepare Yourself for the Next Test
Now that you have made the necessary changes to your app, you will also need to run another test that will ensure whether the changes you have made are good or bad. And if needed, you will have to prepare yourself for another change as well.
These are the best mobile app ab testing practices that the developers follow. And following these practices always work out and benefits the app owner and users alike.
What are the Benefits of Mobile App Testing?
Mobile app A/B testing provides huge benefits; otherwise, developers wouldn't be doing it. Let's find out what those benefits are.
Observe how a new feature is impacting the application and the userbase.
To learn what different customers or users want from a specific application program.
To enhance the in-app engagement.
A better understanding of the target audience and their regular user behavior.
Other benefits of mobile app testing involve reducing or minimizing guesswork. When you can find the real data based on the user behavior and engagement rate through mobile app A/B testing, you wouldn't have to put any effort into guessing what's going to work the best for your application and users. This is why mobile app API testing is the most important thing you can't avoid. If you are developing an application, the first stage after creating the app is to check it through the A/B testing kits. This will help you develop your hypothesis about how and when you will run your application marketing campaign to generate more leads and conversions in the future.
What Are the Steps for A/B Testing?
There are ten steps of implementing a successful mobile app ab testing plan:
Determine your target audience.
What do you want to test in the app?
Try to include surprise features that were not predicted by the A/B testing reports.
Tried to use compelling CTAs.
Modify the test contents according to your audience.
Execute the testing technique as the reports suggest, and don't try to cut it down short to save your time or effort.
Don't inject additional modifications when and the AB testing is running.
Try to include different layouts and formats.
Test the application from time to time.
Always note down the results you are getting from each test.
Conclusion
We are sure that the app you have developed is unique enough to stand out in the crowd. But implementing proper mobile app A/B testing will make it even greater. A/b testing is the best way to find out what works on your app and what does not, what the users like and what they don't. Thus, it will make your application better than those of your competitors. Ultimately, your app will capture millions of hearts, increase your conversion rate, and help you grow your business further. For more articles related to mobile app A/B testing, check out our blog.