Is It Really Worth A/B Testing Your Call To Action Button Color?

There are so many case studies and articles about how you can increase you conversion rate by 25-50% just by changing the color of your call-to-action button. I’m calling shenanigans on those tests not only because of common sense saying that a simple color change isn’t going to massively increase your conversion rate, but because of our own trials showing that you’re just not going to see these kinds of results.

You may see a small bump 1 or 2% bump in your conversion rate if you do test the button color. Kudos if you do. However you’re going to need a lot of time and traffic if you’re going to reach a level of significance to get conclusive results for such a test. To go from a 5% conversion rate to a 5.10% conversion rate, you need 736,812 visits to your page. If you can get that amount of visitors to your site in a short amount of time, I applaud you, but that’s out of the scope for most websites.

If you’re going to spend the time and potentially money for a test, go for broke! Change the color of your button, the location of the button, the page’s headline and change the page’s image to a video. Do it all once. That’s where you’re really going to see results. When going from a 5% conversion rate to a 6% conversion rate, you only need 6131 visits to the page. Now that’s more reasonable, and results we can agree would be worthwhile to pursue. Now if the test starts to lose, remember that many A/B testing solutions will begin to show the winning page more often so you minimize your risk of losing out on sales.

So what are some of the pages you should consider testing?

• The ones with the most visits. These pages are probably your most important and will provide the fastest results.
• Your landing pages producing the most amount of sales. These are your highest value pages.
• Your pages with the highest bounce rates. Be careful with this though because if you do landing pages correctly and only really offer one concrete call to action on the page (buy or leave), you’re probably going to see a high bounce rate on the page regardless.