A/B Testing Alternative When Your Website Has Low Traffic

If you're here, you're probably interested in optimizing your website but stuck with low traffic. 

A/B testing may be hailed as the holy grail of skyrocketing conversion rate. However, it needs a significant amount of traffic in order to provide beneficial results among other things. Don't worry, even if your website gets little traffic! Plenty of alternates of A/B testing are available to explore. 

Here, we'll tell you about some effective AB testing alternatives that work great even with low traffic. Let's jump in.

Alternative 1: Conduct Customer Interviews

Customer interviews are a fantastic way to get direct feedback from the people who use your site. You can know about their preferences, sometimes pain points, and even about overall user experience first-hand.

The great thing about customer interviews is that you don't need a large sample size. Even a handful of in-depth interviews can provide you with rich, qualitative data.

Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels

How to conduct customer interviews?

• Running customer interviews is a really simple method. You need to start by identifying a group of customers who resemble your target audience.
• Then, reach out to them via email or through your website. And ask if they'd be willing to participate in a short interview.
• In the meantime, list questions based on areas you want to explore. Such as their overall experience with your site, what they find confusing, and what features they wish you had.

For example, suppose you run a small e-commerce website selling handmade jewelry. By interviewing a few customers, you learn that many need clarification on your checkout process. They also mention that they'd love to see more photos of the jewelry models wear.

Now, with this information, you can make specific improvements to your site. This could be simplifying the checkout process, including tutorials along with that or adding more product photos to give them customers better idea about the product.

Alternative 2: Test Your Ideas with Prototypes

Creating prototypes is one of the best, if not the best, ways to test new ideas. It's also helpful in designing without committing to full-scale development.

Prototyping is perfect for low-traffic websites. Because it focuses on the quality of interactions of your product or service rather than quantity of users.

Prototypes can range from simple wireframes to interactive mockups, depending on your needs. It can measure user reactions to new designs, identify usability issues, and gather feedback on new features.

How to test your ideas with prototype?

• Let's say you want to redesign the homepage of your travel blog. You want to make it more engaging. You think updating the design will help you increase conversion. So, you create a prototype of the new layout, include elements like image sliders and clickable buttons.
• You then share this prototype with a few regular readers and ask for their feedback.
• Based on their responses, you tweak the design to better meet their expectations. 

How does testing with prototypes differ from conducting customer interviews?

Well, one similarity is both involve taking in-depth interview of customers that resemble your target audience. However, in case of prototype, you make some changes and try to validate these changes by your users. And make further improvements from their review and feedbacks. In case of the first alternative mentioned in this article, you go straight to your customers to identify the issues they might be facing with your product or website. Then you try to improve or fix those.

Alternative 3: Test Changes with Small Dataset

If you have low traffic, you can still conduct alternative forms of A/B testing. But it doesn't need to be as statistically rigorous as traditional methods. This can be done by making changes and observing their impact over time.

This Non-scientific A/B testing can help you measure the overall impact of changes on user behavior. It can also measure conversion rates. The process provides directional insights rather than statistically significant results.

Plus, this approach doesn't rely on large amounts of data.

How can you use small dataset to test changes?

To run non-scientific A/B tests, make one change at a time and monitor its impact over a fixed period. Use analytics tools to track different valuable metrics. These could be bounce rate, conversion rate, or average session duration.

Compare these metrics before and after the change to see if there are any noticeable improvements.

For example, you have a small blog where you sell digital products. Now, you've decided to test a new CTA button on your product pages. Instead of the usual "Buy Now" button, you've used "Get Instant Access."

After a few weeks, if you notice the new CTA has led to a slight increase in conversions, your changes are working!

While the results aren't statistically significant, they suggest that the new CTA is more effective, and you decide to keep it.

Alternative 4: Enhance Experience Through Research

User experience (UX) research never fails. By finding out how users interact with your site, you can also identify ways to improve their experience. 

UX research can measure usability issues, user satisfaction, and areas for improvement. The process will provide insights into users' perceptions and how they usually navigate your website.

How can you research UX of your site?

Use methods like usability testing, heatmaps, and session recordings to start your UX research. Usability testing is all about observing users' interactions and activities on your website. Heatmaps will show where users click and scroll, while session recordings provide playback of user interactions. Many tools are readily available these days that will give you these data.

UX research is effective even with a small user base. For example, a non-profit organization with limited traffic could use session recordings to discover that visitors are not noticing an important donation button. It may be blended with the background that makes it difficult to notice. 

Alternative 5: Poll Your Audience

Polling your audience is a concise yet powerful tool for gathering user feedback. You can ask some questions and get direct responses from your audience.

Surveys and polls can measure user satisfaction, preferences, and opinions. You can easily get quantitative data that can help you in making decisions.

How can you start a poll?

• Use tools like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or Typeform to run surveys and polls. Create a set of questions that are relevant to your goals.
• Then, you need to spread the survey via email or social media. You can also do this directly on your website.
• Next, analyze the responses you get to identify trends and valuable insights.

This approach works well for low-traffic sites as they rely on user engagement rather than sheer numbers.

For example, a local restaurant could survey its website visitors to find out what new dishes they would like to see on the menu. This will not require a great number of visitors. Even with few moderate responses, the restaurant can make data-driven decisions.

Alternative 6: Fix What's Holding You Back

Fix what you think is broken. Identifying and resolving problems can significantly impact your conversion rate. But in this case, you find the problems not your users or data. You may solely use your intuitions or site audit tools

How can you do this?

• Start with a thorough audit of your site. Look for broken links and other technical issues like slow-loading pages. 
• Go through all the pages and features of your website or app as a regular user to find out any issues.
• Use Google Pagespeed or such tools to optimize your site.
• Now fix these issues and later observe before and after state of different website metrics such as conversion, browsing time etc. to find out if the changes made any positive impact.

This solution really doesn't need any A/B testing tool. Even small websites can benefit from just fixing broken elements.

For example, you're running a membership site for fitness enthusiasts. After analyzing your site, you discover many users are abandoning the registration process halfway through. By analyzing further, you find that the form is too long and complicated.

To fix the problem, you may simplify the form. You can reduce the number of fields, for example, and make it more user-friendly or enable signing up using Google or Facebook. As a result, you see a significant increase in completed registrations.

Outro

When working with low website traffic, exploring alternates of A/B testing can help get valuable insights. You just need to find the right ways and get to know your users better. You can use one of these alternatives or combine two together. Remember, the key is to stay curious, explore ideas, and continuously iterate on your website.