---
title: "What is A/B testing?"
description: "A practical A/B testing overview for landing pages, email, checkout, ads, and social, plus tools like Optimizely and cloaking pitfalls."
canonical_url: https://www.oguzhan.co/what-is-ab-testing/
author: "Oğuzhan Koçaklı"
author_url: https://www.oguzhan.co/about/
date_published: 2016-10-11T11:49:36+00:00
date_modified: 2026-09-14T06:00:52+00:00
language: en
translations:
  tr: https://www.oguzhan.co/tr/ab-testi-nedir/
---

# What is A/B testing?

![ab-test](http://www.oguzhan.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/AB-test-300x158.png)Ecommerce firms try different content and design samples to lift conversion. To measure what wins they run tests, and A/B testing is one of the main ones.

An A/B test reveals how two or more conditions perform. You track the changes you care about, measure conversion, and adjust.

## Where is A/B testing used?

It can serve many goals:

- Landing-page optimization: show different designs to different groups and keep the winner.
- Email marketing: send different templates to different segments and measure.
- Product, cart, and checkout pages: redesign around features users prefer.
- Ads and campaigns: serve different AdWords creatives and watch returns.
- Social content: post different pieces at different times and see which hours and formats win.\
  *Our social media guides cover channel use in more detail.*
- Signup forms: change fields or steps and compare completion.

## What kinds of changes can you test?

Small design tweaks are enough:

- Fonts and type sizes
- Landing-page openers and offer copy
- Image size and placement
- Colors
- Ad banner position and size
- Product color options on product pages
- How many products appear on a page

## ![ab-testi-nedir](http://www.oguzhan.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/ab-testi-nedir.jpg)

## A/B testing tools

If you are light on engineering, use tools such as [Unbounce](http://unbounce.com/), [Optimizely](https://www.optimizely.com/), [Vertster](http://www.vertster.com/), [Webtrends](http://webtrends.com/solutions/conversion-optimization), [Adobe Test&Target](http://www.adobe.com/products/testandtarget.html), and the WordPress plugin [MaxA/B](http://wordpress.org/plugins/maxab/).

They let you edit pages and track conversions in one place.

This video walks through how Optimizely works in detail.

[http://player.vimeo.com/video/13298531?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0](http://player.vimeo.com/video/13298531?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0)

## What should you watch while running A/B tests?

Best practice: each user should see only one variant, including on return visits. Seeing both muddies measurement. Dropping a cookie in the browser is a solid fix.

Another risk: aiming one variant at users and another at search engines. When those diverge, you get “cloaking,” and search engines may blacklist the site as trying to game rankings.

If you A/B an ad campaign in a fixed window, keep both the old and new formats live. Dropping the old one makes it hard to tell whether the new creative or the new campaign itself moved results.