AB testing

[rudolfl]

Hi all,

 

I want to do basic AB testing. For example, i want to change product information page and want to see how people react.

Actual statistics can be collected via Google Analytics, but I need some mechanism on the site that will show different versions of the page to different customers.

 

Is there an add-on that allows for AB testing?

 

Thanks,

Rudolf

[♥bruyndoncx]

it is my understanding that you have to define that within the AB testing tool of google - or is that no longer available ?

[rudolfl]

Are you saying that Google makes a decision which page to show?

For example, I have two versions of shopping cart. I want 50% of customers to be directed to one version and 50% to another. I thought that site has to make a decision and Google will record the statistics.

 

But I will get into details of what Google can do.

 

Rudolf

[Jack_mcs]

Google will randomly serve the various pages so that isn't something you have to do. You do have to supply the various pages though. That will be difficult for product pages, I think.

[MrPhil]

Does Google have access to the "live" PHP pages, or is it just serving static copies? osC really isn't architected to serve up different page versions, but I suppose it could be done with a sufficiently large hammer and saw. Two versions of a given page (or CSS file), a random number generator, and the page "include" picking the randomly selected version. If you want to do A/B across the entire store (consistently A or B across multiple pages), you'd have to pick A or B once and carry it around somewhere in the session information -- a lot more work. Don't make the new page(s) too different from the old, as this can freak out customers used to the old page(s) -- they may think the site has been hacked or they're being diverted to some other site.

[Jack_mcs]

I haven't played with this in a very long time so things may be different now but when I did it, I copied the source of my home page and then edited that file to make various changes and uploaded them as html (static) files. Then I listed those pages in google and they would serve them up randomly when a link to the home page was clicked in googles listings.

 

The same could be done for a product page but it would be a lot of work if more than a few products were to be monitored. Since the product page looks mostly like the home page (same header, footer and columns), I would think just testing the home page would be enough to determine the best version.

[♥bruyndoncx]

same here , long time ago (5 years or more), but I remember thinking it would only be easy to do if testing just little changes like color, size of buttons, but not completely rearranged pages.

I was thinking along the lines of MrPhill but concluded to do it properly (like trackng if visitor got version A/B/C would be too much hassle) and too have statistically meaningfull results you have to have significant numbers of visitors.

 

edit: and it didn't really support multi-lingual sites, so I could play with different texts on the buttons

 

 

UPDATE

Since I look at this, things have changed a lot.

http://www.sitepoint.com/3-ab-testing-tools-compared/

 

 

As far as I know there is no such add-on that serves different ones, Î think you would have to include a parameter for the version you want served and code it up yourself.

[♥bruyndoncx]

this looks good , hosted on github, GPL and doesn't seem hard to integrate in oscommerce

http://phpabtest.com