If you’ve set aside a sum that you are willing to invest into A/B testing or you are running a department that is just getting into it, you should know the best ways to distribute your resources.

Every A/B testing budget’s distribution should be set up according to its goals and strategy.

Should you hire an Expert or an Agency to do the A/B testing for you?

These two approaches are both the right answer but in different scenarios. In order to determine which one is better for you, you should first lay out clear goals and methodologies for your working process.

Pros and Cons of an In House Expert or Team

When you hire an expert to sit in the office or work as an independent freelancer for you, you get a bit more control over the situation. If your company is well established and has an already recognizable brand image, you should most likely go for an extension of your marketing team and hire an expert to do the A/B testing for you.

Pros:

• Can be reached quickly. Good communication
• An in house expert will learn more about your organization and will eventually specialize in it.
• They can be used for other purposes and functions as well. Can also be used as a consultant to other projects and teams.
• Can fully devote themself to your needs.

Cons:

• Can get tired of the same workflow after a while.
• Your corporation might hinder their creativity.

Hiring an Agency to do the A/B testing for you

Agencies are third parties that can work for you in many different areas. They might not be available at your exact office hours, depending on what you pick, so make sure you get one in a close location to you. Their cumulative experience would be a plus you could use to your advantage. Sometimes only one or two people can’t handle the task of testing out everything, so hiring a resourceful agency would do the trick.

Pros:

• Leading Agencies are self-evolving and are always up to date with the most common trends and marketing strategies.
• Can lead to establishing a relationship with the agency and lead to working on other projects or functions.
• They have the manpower to handle anything, really.

Cons:

• You need someone to lead the communication between organizations and maintain it all the time.
• Jack of all trades is often a master of none. (Unless you hire a specialized agency to do this exact job, they are most likely going to do it at a mediocre level.)

If you are planning to continue A/B testing for a long time on various projects, then hiring an in-house team is more likely to lead to better results over time. Statistics show that in case you need a one-time thing, agencies get better results more often.

What do you need to invest in in order to do A/B Testing?

If you want to establish your own CRO team or you want to run it yourself, you would need to invest in a few things before starting, and the most important of which is the A/B testing tool you would get.

How to choose a suitable A/B testing tool for your business?

Whether you decide it’s up to you or you hire someone to do the job for you, be it an agency or a team, you need the right tools for the job. The different types of tools that can enter your A/B testing arsenal can be divided into three categories.

1. Qualitative A/B tools, that can help you analyze and understand data. A good example of such a tool here is Hotjar. With similar tools, you can track the behaviour of your audiences.
2. Quantitative A/B tools, that are used to measure the actions of your audience in a manner that you can see how many people clicked, where they clicked and this data would eventually lead to you figuring out why. A similar example is Kameleoon the software in the image above.
3.  Website Analytics. Google Analytics or a plugin installed in your website or website’s platform can give you the necessary insights to increase your decision making’s accuracy. The first step toward improvement is knowing what you need to test and which parts of your website convert and which don’t.

CRO heavily relies on data and measuring the results from testing. Without the proper tools, you are left shooting in the dark. Aside from that, the people using the tools should also know what they are doing so hiring the proper staff is important too.

Hiring a CRO expert

A CRO expert should be able to perform all of the activities listed above in the image starting from Strategy and planning and ending with analysis and giving out recommendations to the decision-makers within an organization.

Unlike the regular person, the expert knows what to do when a test fails. When conducting A/B tests we usually expect immediate results and feel disappointed when the first couple of tests are unsuccessful.

Getting an expert to do the job for you frees you more time to learn and grow, and even learn from them. Other people think marketing experts can do it all and hand the task to some of their digital marketers, distracting them from other projects.

In most cases, this is a mistake. CRO and A/B testing require a lot of attention and if you want optimal results it should be done by someone who is fully committed to the task.

When to hire an in-house expert: You would want to hire an expert if you can’t afford an agency, or you don’t quite qualify for an agency’s requirements like traffic or budget. Another good reason to hire someone within the company is to invest in their skills and company culture.

Invest in your hire

After you’ve hired the right person for the job, purchase the tools they need and introduce them into the company’s culture. Aside from that, make sure you train them in relevant skills that they lack experience in.

In order to save yourself some of that, make sure while conducting the hiring interview, to get to know whether they are proficient in:

• Properly reading data.
• Creating valid or erroneous hypotheses on demand.
• If they are creative enough to find test ideas.
• If they are patient to run a test for 1-2 months (As long as needed.)
• Testing the right thing.

There are many online courses and programs that focus on A/B testing and CRO. You can enrol your chosen candidate to learn and study with the best experts in the field before you put them on the task.

Optimising A/B testing

The more resourceful a company becomes, the more it can grow and scale based on that.

Build a database repository

If you create a database of knowledge and past trials full of success and error, your future hires would have a place to learn from. Moreover, you would be able to take a look into the past and see for yourself how things have been going the past couple of months or even years.

A similar database could consist of all past tests that you’ve run and information on them such as:

1. The reason for the test.
2. The webpage that you tested.
3. What was the hypothesis behind the A/B test?
4. What was the control, and what was the variation? (What you changed and tested?)
5. What was the result? Was it an increase, or decrease of the conversion? Or was there no result?
6. Did the changes go live?
7. Order value change, if you pushed the change live.
8. Additional notes of the tester.

All of these can be separated in a spreadsheet and can be filled in within a couple of minutes after you perform a test. This way you would form a great testing culture in your organization that wouldn’t only help you, but will also greatly facilitate your fresh hires and save you a lot of trouble. While this is the easiest way to build a repository, you can use dedicated tools for the job.

Additional steps to increasing A/B testing productivity

In order to increase the productivity and overall efficiency of your tests, you need to increase their frequency and quantity while removing errors and improving them at the same time. If you automate the process to a certain degree, especially running a good pre-test set-up, you can save a lot of resources.

In each test there are repeatable elements, take advantage of standard operating procedures and build such that your teams can follow. Moreover, the more automated a process is, the less margin for human error you can fall victim to.

Data Quality is an important part of A/B testing

The more traffic your website gets, the more advanced system you should be using. A platform like Google Analytics 360 can give you insights you didn’t think even existed. But there are other tools that you can use which can integrate with former tools you’ve used like GA.

Adobe Analytics is also something you can consider as it gives very accurate data and can aid you while performing A/B tests, which Google Analytics doesn’t do.

Javascript can level up your game

Relying only on tools is okay up to a certain point. But if you begin getting tons of traffic, you might need to perform more complex tests, which require some coding that a software editor can’t really offer you.

Hire a javascript developer that can write and run more precise and complex A/B tests with the help of code.

Don’ worry, if you are using a proper tool like GA 360 or Adobe Analytics, you would still see all the data measurements and statistics, since the developer can implement the code with the help of your tools.

Widen the scope of your Testing team

Now that you have a dedicated in-house testing team, you can get a better return on investment if they can implement their knowledge and skills across various projects and teams. Improving one step at a time can lead to a large overall increase in productivity across both internal and external operational systems and employees.

Did you know that almost anything could be A/B Tested? You can also test employee satisfaction and work environments to make sure your employees are getting the best possible treatment. And while that might not directly increase your conversion rate, it would definitely lead to creativity and productivity in your teams, which would eventually mean good CRO.

Conclusion

Whether you decide to run things yourself, hire an agency, or an in-house expert, each of these options can be a valid solution for your business. If you are just starting and don’t have the funds to hire anyone else, you have no choice but to do the things yourself. Then, invest in good A/B testing software, to begin with.

If you are wondering whether to hire an agency or an in-house expert, evaluate your goals and the scope of your project and ask yourself the questions laid within the article. Sometimes the more costly option can yield greater results and thus result to be cheaper for your business.