A/B Testing

What Is A/B Testing for Push Notifications?

A/B testing for push notifications enables you to see how your audience reacts to different versions of the same notification. The idea is simple. You create 2 variants of the same notification with one or more variables to test, such as title, description, image, or so on.

Then, you send notification A to 50% of your test audience and notification B to the other 50% to see which one gets more clicks, traffic, and conversions.

So, why is testing notifications a good practice?

Once you know which version works better, it’s easy to understand why it worked better because you only made a single, specific change. And then you can double down on what works best to get more clicks and more traffic!

A/B Testing Examples for Push Notifications

Now that you understand what A/B testing is, let’s see a few examples. So, what exactly can you test push notifications against?

Notification content

You can A/B test two aspects of notification content:

• Notification Title: This is the same as testing two versions of your blog post’s titles to see which one gets more clicks. You can have two different titles for your notification without changing the actual headline of your article.
• Notification Message: This is somewhat similar to changing your page description to see which one is more attractive. An interesting example is to use the same copy in two different languages to see which one your audience responds to more enthusiastically.

Landing page URL

The URL is quite possibly the most overlooked part of the entire notification. But in reality, your subscribers will be able to see the URL that the notification leads to. Now, there are two things to keep in mind here:

• Use descriptive URLs that make sense. Most people confuse the “keyword in the URL” tip to be an SEO exercise. In practice, it just offers a better user experience that leads to more clicks. So, we highly recommend using “SEO-friendly” URLs for your push notifications. Just in case the notification isn’t getting clicks, you can try using a different URL for the landing page.
  
• Use your own domain and branding. You can use PushEngage subdomain to collect and send push notifications if your site doesn’t have HTTPS. But for the best results, we recommend you install an SSL certificate on your site and use your own brand name and domain for sending notifications.

Notification Images

Images are heavily responsible for enticing your audience to engage with your notifications. We highly recommend A/B test your push notification images as well. There are two types of images in a push notification. To clarify, you can split test both images.

• Notification icon: A notification icon is the equivalent of the site icon or favicon on your website. The only difference is, it’s actually a good idea to test different notification icons because it doesn’t necessarily have to be your favicon.
• Large image: The large image on a push notification is like the featured image of a blog post. The large image shows up as part of your notifications. So, we recommend split testing the image like you would split test the design of any digital advertisement.

Multi-Action Button

PushEngage notifications are all clickable. But just in case you want the option, we also offer different Call To Action (CTA) buttons:

• Grab Now 
• Last Chance
• Click Now
• Check Offer

You can A/B test which of these CTAs are most effective. 

Interaction Types

Interaction split testing is pretty advanced and we don’t recommend changing the default settings unless you know what you’re doing. Interaction testing compares two notifications with different expiry times.

Set the first version to expire in 20 seconds and the other one to stay on until the subscriber clicks on it or removes it. 

Unless you have a highly engaged audience, we don’t recommend using the second option as it can really annoy subscribers who aren’t expecting to hear from you.

How to A/B Test Push Notifications

We talked a lot about the pros, cons, and hypotheticals of A/B testing push notifications. Let’s show you how you can actually do it using PushEngage now:

Step #1: Go to Notifications in the Dashboard:

Step #2: Click on the Create:

Step #3: Click New AB Notification

Step #4: Setup the notifications

Note: We recommend testing out individual notifications before you put them on an autoresponder. Trying to A/B test notifications in an existing drip autoresponder is a bad idea as it can break the continuity of the messages.

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