How To Run A/B Test in Omniture SiteCatalyst
Are you, like many, who have Omniture SiteCatalyst in-house but cannot afford to layer on Test&Target or another A/B testing solution? Well, welcome to the party lol…but seriously, just because you can’t purchase another solution for your company, does that mean you are left out in the cold? The simple answer to that is NO. This posting will cover the topic of leveraging SiteCatalyst to run A/B test and to take that new data point and correlate/subrelate against other variables.To leverage SiteCatalyst for A/B testing (synchronous), you can use a combination of sprops and eVars, which are perfect for A/B testing because they allow you to set a variable on a page and then wait to see what traffic or conversion event occurs. If you are testing two versions of a page, you can simply set the variables to a value that tells something about the given page, within either s_code.js or in the base code, when the visitors load the page. You can also use a traffic variable, called s.prop, in A/B testing for traffic and pathing-related data. If you are interested in knowing how different versions affect traffic and pathing on your site, then all you need to do is copy the value that you populated the eVar with into the sProp*.* Please remember that pathing is not automatically turned on for all sProps so you will need to contact Omniture ClientCare and have them enable pathing for that specific sprop.Below is a proposed solution for testing two different creative versions via Omniture:Let’s say you have two versions of creative and you want to see which one performs better. This is one of the simpler A/B test. In this specific case, all you need to do is assign a value to corresponding s.prop and s.evar on both the control and test page. Here is a snippet of code that could be used to accomplish this.s.pageName=”Home”s.prop1=”Control Version”s.prop2=”Control Version:A”s.eVar1 = “Control Version”Setting up the code like this would enable you to not only see pathing by creative version but also traffic reports (page views, unique visitors, avg time spent, etc) and commerce (orders, revenue, items, etc) broken down by those two new variables. Leveraging the pathing will require you to either set up the getAndPersistValue plugin or create logic that captures the creative version on the initial page and appends on the page name then on subsequent pages just passes the page name. On the other creative version, the following snippet of code would go.s.pageName=”Home”s.prop1=”Test Version 1”s.prop2=”Test Version 1:A”s.eVar1 = “Test Version 1”There are other forms of testing (segmentation and consecutive) that will be discussed at a later time.
Written by:
Dorian D. Regester
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Google+
Hey,I am regular visitor of this website. You have really contributed very good info here.