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How to A/B Test Elementor with Google Optimize (Or Other WordPress Content)

Last Updated on July 28th, 2023

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With its powerful drag-and-drop editor, as well as its Theme Builder and Popup Builder, Elementor is truly an all-in-one landing page creator.

However, there is still one little thing missing that would put things over the top – A/B testing! Yes, if you’re building landing pages, or other conversion-focused content, you’ll probably want the ability to A/B test Elementor designs to find the one that’s optimal, and that’s not something Elementor lets you do out of the box.

Don’t worry, though! It’s totally possible to A/B test Elementor content, and I’m going to show you how to do it with a free tool – Google Optimize.

What’s even cooler is that, while we are focusing this WordPress A/B testing tutorial on Elementor because we love and use Elementor, this technique will actually work for any type of WordPress content, including content you create with the Block or Classic editors, as well as content you create with a different WordPress page builder plugin.

What is Google Optimize?

Formerly known as Google Analytics Content Experiments, Google Optimize is a free service that lets you divide your traffic between two or more variants, collect data, and then pick the winner.

It even gives you an in-browser editor that lets you edit your site’s content, which makes it super easy to create different testing variants.

What’s also great about it is that it’s totally platform independent, so it’s easy to integrate into WordPress and Elementor to A/B test your content. Plus, it’s got a very attractive price – free.

To get started, all you’ll need is a regular Google account. Then, I’ll show you how to set everything else up to A/B test Elementor and WordPress.

How to A/B Test Elementor and WordPress with Google Optimize

To follow this tutorial, I’ll assume two things.

First, I’ll assume that you’ve already created your “base” page in Elementor. That is, you already have a finished page that you want to use as the “original” test subject. You’ll create your variants based on this page.

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Second, I’ll assume that you already have the Google Analytics tracking code on your site. If you don’t, you’ll want to follow our guide to adding Google Analytics to WordPress before you jump into this Google Optimize WordPress tutorial. I recommend using the Insert Headers and Footers plugin method to add Google Analytics, as it will make it easy to access the code.

Other than that, I’ll cover everything else you need to do.

1. Create a New Google Optimize Experience

To get started, head to Google Optimize and sign in with your Google account.

From there, you’ll need to create an account:

Create an account Google Optimize

Then, you’ll add a container to that account, which can just be your website’s URL:

Add container

Once you have a container, you’ll need to click the button to create your first “Experience”. An Experience is basically a specific A/B test experiment that you want to run:

Create experience

In the side popout:

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  • Add a name
  • Enter the URL of the page you want to test. This will be the “original” test subject, and it’s the basis for your variant pages.
  • Select the type of experience. Usually, you’ll want to leave it as the default A/B test option. However, you can also test two entirely separate pages by selecting the Redirect Test option. The redirect test is helpful if you want to, say, test two entirely different Elementor templates against one another, rather than just testing different headlines or button texts.

Add A/B testing page

2. Add Your First Variant

Next, click the Add Variant button to add the variant that you want to test:

Create Elementor A/B test variant

Give your variant a name in the side popup. Then, click the Edit button to edit the variant:

Edit variant

Google will then recommend that you install the free Optimize Chrome extension, which I also recommend that you do.

This will launch a live preview of your site, along with an editor where you can edit your actual content. For my site, this is an Elementor template that I imported with an Astra starter site.

To edit any content, you just click on it.

For example, if I wanted to test changing the headline text, I would click on the headline and select Edit text:

Google Optimize editor

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This will let you edit the text right on the page:

Edited text in Google Optimize

When you’re finished making the changes that you want to test, click the Save button in the top-right corner.

3. Add More Variants and Customize Weighting (Optional)

If you want, you can add multiple variants and even change how traffic is divided between different variants. This is totally optional, though – I’m just going to go with a 50/50 split:

Variant split

4. Choose Audience

By default, Google Optimize will run the A/B test Elementor experiment on all visitors to that page.

However, if you scroll down to the Audience targeting section, you can customize this. For example, you could only target:

  • Specific devices
  • New visitors (but not returning visitors)
  • Browser or operating systems
  • Etc.

Audience targeting

5. Link to Google Analytics

In order to track what happens to different variants, you’ll need to link Google Optimize to Google Analytics.

To do this, scroll down to the Measurement and objectives section and click the Link to Analytics button:

This will open a slide-out where you can select your site’s Google Analytics property from the drop-down:

Choose Google Analytics property

Once you do that, you’ll need to swap out your original Google Analytics tracking code for the updated version that Google gives you (or, you can just add the part in red to the existing code):

Updated code

6. Choose Objective

Once you’ve linked your Google Analytics account, you can click the button to Add Experiment Objective.

For best results, you’ll want to combine this with Google Analytics Event Tracking – learn how to set up Google Analytics Event Tracking in WordPress.

For example, if your objective is to get people to click a button, you can add event tracking to that button and then use that as your objective:

Choose A/B test objective

Or, you can track generic metrics like session duration or bounce rate, which are much simpler.

7. Run Diagnostics

At this point, you’re pretty much ready to go.

To verify that you’ve set everything up properly, find the Optimize installation setting and click Run Diagnostics:

If all goes well, you’ll see a success message:

8. Start Your Test

Now that you’ve configured everything, you can click the Start button to make your test live. Or, you can also click that clock icon to schedule your test to start at some time in the future:

And that’s it!

Once you get some data, you can view it in the Reporting tab:

And once you’ve found the winning variant, you can stop your test and make that change in Elementor (or any other WordPress content editor).

Final Thoughts

As you can see, there’s a little learning curve to Google Optimize, but I think that’s worth it because Google Optimize is a really powerful way to run A/B tests on your WordPress site, and it’s also 100% free.

While I showed you how to A/B test Elementor content for this example, this technique will work with any WordPress content from any editor or page builder, so you have a lot of options here!

Any questions about how to use Google Optimize to A/B test Elementor and WordPress? Ask away in the comments and we’ll do our best to help out!

A team of WordPress experts that love to test out new WordPress related software, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.