Why Many Apps Are Leaving Money on the Table

Everyone who’s not A/B testing is leaving their app unoptimized and losing out on more engaged customers and more revenue. Most app managers I talk to seem to realize this, but we at Apptimize still often hear from some customers that they don’t want to “just change copy and colors.” There seems to a segment of mobile app managers that feel that simple tests to buttons, icons, copy, images, and layout are too shallow and not going to make a difference in their app. They just want to jump to the advanced tests on flows, feature, and algorithms.

This approach is not only wrong but actually incredibly damaging to your team’s efforts at improving your app.

Small changes have an incredible payoff compared to time invested.

There is no denying that big changes to your app such as entirely new flows, suggestion algorithms, and features can make a huge impact on improving the user experience. However, it’s also a fact that large changes take more time to build. With any mobile A/B testing platform, small changes to copy and icons take about 10 minutes to set up. Testing new checkout flows or suggestion algorithms can take a few hours to a few days to create.

Additionally, Apptimize allows app managers to push out A/B tests between app release cycles. This means that it not only takes 5 minutes to set up an A/B test with the Visual Apptimizer, it also only takes 15 minutes for your users to start engaging with the test. Complex programmatic are locked into development cycles and require a lot of planning. Simple tests to visual app elements can be done on the fly.

Yes, you eventually want to test everything, but most companies that have built a great culture around experimentation test more small things than big things simply because it’s easier to test small changes. Surprisingly, making a purchase button slightly bigger can sometimes have almost as big of an impact on sales as changing the entire checkout flow.

Here is a recording of our last webinar that goes into specific simple A/B tests that have worked for others in the past and only took minutes to set up:

And when an A/B test to a string of copy doesn’t work out, you’ve lost 5 mins. If a new feature does nothing for your app, you might have lost days of engineering time.

Small changes are the best first step towards a culture of experimentation.

A/B testing is a muscle within your organization that needs to be built over time. Companies like Khan Academy and KAYAK didn’t create amazing experiences from the start. They iterated on an original idea with a combination of user feedback, intuition/experience, and calculated A/B tests.

While it’s possible to jump to complex tests that leverage user behavior or demographics, testing requires expertise that needs to built over time. Many A/B tests don’t yield any significant results. It takes time to figure out what has a high likelihood to make an impact and what doesn’t.

Small changes to icons and colors can be a great way to build your testing muscles.

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