A/B testing. In marketing and business intelligence, A/B testing is jargon for a randomized experiment with two variants, A and B, which are the control and treatment in the controlled experiment. It is a form of statistical hypothesis testing with two variants leading to the technical term, Two-sample hypothesis testing, used in the field of statistics. Other terms used for this method include bucket tests and split testing but these terms have a wider applicability to more than two variants. In online settings, such as web design (especially user experience design), the goal is to identify changes to web pages that increase or maximize an outcome of interest (e.g., click-through rate for a banner advertisement).
Formally the current web page is associated with the null hypothesis. As the name implies, two versions (A and B) are compared, which are identical except for one variation that might affect a user's behavior. §Common Test Statistics[edit] §History[edit] §An emailing campaign example[edit] Visual Website Optimizer. Test&Target: Omniture. Testing Awards Winners 2010.