What is A/B Testing?

A/B testing is a method of testing two variants of the same web page or cookie banner to website visitors in order to compare which variation drives the highest number of opt-ins.  A/B testing is a crucial step for websites seeking to maintain compliance while also optimizing opt-in rates through preference management.

Recent global data privacy regulations require organizations to include a cookie banner to inform users about the tracking technologies used as well as collect user consent. Today, companies of all sizes are challenged with deploying a banner that doesn’t create an extra layer of friction that hinders the user experience.

For instance, if a user decides to abandon the website or mobile app and doesn’t provide consent due to the cookie banner’s UI, that action impacts opt-ins and the marketing performance tracking. This can ultimately lead to a decrease in revenue and personalized ad delivery.

So, what’s the solution to maximizing consent rates, user experience, and ad delivery? We recommend using out-of-the-box templates, applying A/B testing, monitoring consent rates for all the banners tested, and reconfiguring your banner based on the winning variation.

How CookiePro Helps

CookiePro customers have leveraged A/B testing to deploying multiple banner designs to monitor which design generated the highest opt-ins. Customers have successfully tested banner variations to measure consumer opt-in rates. By doing so customers can understand the impact of banner placement, design, and language have on a user’s decision to opt-in or opt-out.

A best practice is to narrow the field to several of the highest performing interactions and to run additional rounds of testing. Continuous measurement and iteration are key to keeping in line with the data protection regulations and recent enforcement action.

• Configure Your Banner Variations: Customize multiple cookie banners to test different variants such as colors, button text, CTAs, banner placement, and vendors. As you are creating different cookie banner variations, be sure to stay within your jurisdiction’s guidelines.
• Deploy and Monitor Opt-Ins: Easily deploy A/B Testing and monitor cookie banner opt-ins in an interactive consent dashboard.
• Iterate and Improve Based on Testing: Once the testing is complete, reconfigure your cookie banner using the winning variation to maximize opt-ins.

A/B Testing Customer Success Story

Progress provides the best products to develop, deploy and manage high-impact business applications. With a global customer base, it is imperative for Progress to stay on top of the evolving privacy landscape. As a company, Progress prides itself on its customer-first approach. Their team prioritized privacy and preference management across their websites as an essential component to building a trusted user experience.

Progress uses OneTrust’s Cookie Consent module to create a trusted and personalized user experience across their fives websites. Through OneTrust’s Cookie Consent module, Progress can tailor these cookie banners to their unique compliance needs as dictated by the various global privacy regulations that impact their users.

After implementing their cookie banners Progress’ team set out on their own to increase opt-in consent rates across their domains while maintaining compliance. Their team originally spent months creating and implementing a plan to test opt-in rates and the variables that influence consent rates. This collaboration took efforts across systems and conferring with their legal team around compliant practices.

Shortly after reviewing the tool, Megan and the team partnered with OneTrust to implement the A/B testing solution to begin testing cookie banner variants.

The teams launched an A/B/C experiment on Progress’ main website. Web visitors from Europe were randomly assigned one of the three cookie banner designs. The three designs included:

• Modal Cookie Banner Popup – Web visitors must interact with the banner before accessing the site
• Cookie Banner centered at the bottom of the webpage
• Cookie Banner extended across the full-width bottom of the screen

By implementing OneTrust’s A/B testing solution Progress’ team was able to clearly visualize and understand opt-in patterns, “We were flying blind prior to implementing the A/B randomizer but through A/B testing we are able to get a better view on user interaction with the banner” Megan said. After just one month of testing, Progress saw an opt-in increase of 20%. The team found that the modal pop-up had the highest performance with an average opt-in rate of 83% and an average opt-out rate of 2%. The next best-performing design was the bottom center cookie banner with an opt-in rate of 76% and an average opt-out of 1%.

Read the full case study here!