One of the four pillars of recruitment marketing is the successful use of social media. (The other three, by the way, are your career site, job boards and distribution, and employment branding.) And like any business effort that you make a significant investment in, it’s important to know that it’s working.
That’s where A/B testing, aka split testing, comes into play.
A/B What?
A/B testing is a form of research where you test variations of your marketing to determine which are most effective. You run a split test by using two different versions of a piece of content – such as a headline, an emoji, a hashtag, an image or a video clip – with changes to a single variable. Then, you show these two versions to similarly sized audiences and analyze which one performs better over a specific period of time.
Tips for Conducting Split Testing
- The Golden Rule of A/B testing is to test only one element at a time. Testing more than one thing can complicate results.
- Make sure to split your sample groups equally and randomly to achieve conclusive results.
- Then, determine your sample size. For instance, if you’re testing an email, use a subset of your list that is large enough to achieve statistically significant results. If you’re testing something that doesn’t have a finite audience, like a web page, then how long you keep your test running will drive your sample size. You’ll need to let it run long enough for a substantial number of views.
- Test both variations simultaneously. Timing is important, whether you’re analyzing time of day, day of the week, or month of the year. And be sure to give your test enough time to produce useful data.
- It helps to ask for feedback from real users. Collect both quantitative and qualitative information. For example, as you test website content, you might not only measure results numerically, but also conduct a survey asking visitors why they didn’t click on a certain call to action.
- After your test is done, measure the significance of your results and then take action based on them. If one variation is statistically better than the other, then you have succeeded. If not, run another test, using the failed data to figure out a new iteration.
How A/B Testing Helps
Among the positive changes you can realize as a result of effective split testing are:
- Increased website traffic: As you test, for instance, a blog post or a page title, this may up the number of people who click on a hyperlinked title.
- Higher conversion rates: By testing different locations, colors or anchor test on your calls to action, you can influence the number of people who click on them to get to a landing page.
- Lower bounce rates: Bouncing occurs when visitors quickly leave after visiting your site.
- As an example: during the summer of 2020, Haley Marketing used A/B testing to learn more about the effectiveness of using photos of people wearing masks – and learned that, at that time, photos with masks lowered cost per candidate by 46.6 percent. However, a year later, photos without masks were 9 percent more effective.
Contact Haley’s Recruitment Marketing team today to learn more about split testing and other solutions to enhance your social media and other pillars of successful candidate recruitment.
