How To Find Out If Your Competitors Are A/B Testing Their Website

What is A/B testing?

At its core, A/B testing refers to a method of comparing two versions of a webpage, email, or other marketing asset to determine which one performs better.

By showing different variants (either A and B or multivariate testing) to segments of your target audience and analyzing the results, you can identify which version drives more conversions, clicks, click-through rates, or other desired actions.

Why is A/B testing important in your competitive analysis?

Understanding your competitors’ A/B testing strategy is crucial for several reasons:

1. Benchmarking: Knowing what your competitors are testing can provide benchmarks for your own strategies. If a competitor consistently optimizes their content, understanding their approach helps you gauge industry standards and performance expectations.
2. Identifying best practices: By observing the elements your competitors focus on—like headlines, call-to-action buttons, or images—you can identify best practices and new ideas that might work for your own marketing efforts.
3. Avoiding pitfalls: Insight into your competitors’ failed tests can help you avoid similar mistakes. If you see a competitor revert changes after a test, it suggests that the variation didn’t perform well, informing you about potential pitfalls.
4. Staying competitive: If your competitors are continuously improving through A/B testing and you’re not, you’ll likely fall behind. Understanding their strategy ensures you remain competitive by adopting and adapting successful tactics.
5. Market adaptation: Competitors’ A/B testing can reveal shifting market preferences. Monitoring their A/B tests helps you stay attuned to changes in consumer behavior and adjust your strategies accordingly.

Can you spy on your competitors’ A/B testing strategy?

After creating all this hype, I’m sorry to say that there is no direct way to do it for all use cases.

Yet.

But you can use some hacks to infer whether your competitors are split-testing some of their campaigns or engaging in a/b testing.

1. Check their tech stack

The first thing you can do is to check their tech stack and see if there is conversion rate optimization software. For example, DocuSign uses Optimizely:

Some of the most popular conversion rate optimization tools are:

• Optimizely
• Hotjar
• VWO Testing
• Instapage
• Unbounce
• AB Tasty
• MoEngage

However, the space is quite crowded, as you can see from the G2 grid for A/B testing.

2. Use a Chrome extension to check Optimizely variants manually

A very old LinkedIn pulse article suggests using the Conversion.com extension when you know that your competitors are using Optimizely to do a/b testing of a web page.

The extension should be able to show you if they are running tests on that web page and also show you the two versions (or more if it’s multivariate testing).

Since the article was so old (and the other method suggested doesn’t work anymore) I tested it and.. the main problem is that you would need to do that manually for each page you want to check.

I tried the DocuSign homepage (and they do use Optimizely; I double-checked) and didn’t get any results.

After reading the reviews, I see that it seems like it’s working for some people. If you’re sure your competitor is conducting a split test on a specific page, you may try it. It just takes a couple of minutes to set it up.

However, that’s the major issue with it—you need to be sure that the page is running tests, or you may waste a lot of time (in particular, if you have many competitors and they have many pages).

3. There’s an app that allows you to see PPC a/b test only

Having worked for AdEspresso for more than five years, you can probably guess what I think about advertising a/b test–you should definitely use it (and don’t take my word for it.)

So, this tool is particularly useful if you’re looking at understanding whether your competitors are a/b testing their PPC landing pages.

However, this is just a very specific use case. Yes, you should definitely check your competitors’ PPC landing pages, but that’s not quite enough.

The best proxy for all use cases: Use Unkover to see webpage changes

So, what do you do if you want to find out if your competitors are A/B testing their web pages?

Your best option here is to use a tool to monitor all their high-value pages. This way, you’ll be notified every time a change occurs on a page.

Hints your competitors are conducting an A/B test:

• Only specific elements of the page change (CTAs, claim, hero, a specific part of the user interface)
• The change is reversed after a while (the testing elements didn’t achieve statistically significant results or failed)
• There is incremental change on that page (i.e., first, the CTA changes, then a design element, then something else)

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Should I copy my competitors’ strategies?

The short answer is: it depends.

It’s definitely a great idea to know what your competitors are doing (we’re all about it at Unkover; that’s the main reason we created this tool!), but even if we’re talking about a direct competitor, you should always (at least):

• analyze
• test

… whatever they are doing. Maybe you have a specific product focus or slightly different ICP, and it’s not guaranteed that what makes them successful will work for you–it may, but you need to test it.

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