I won’t bore you with what A/B testing is. You probably already know and, if you don’t, far more experienced people have written about it before. Most A/B testing tools rely on redirects – a bit of JavaScript code that sends people to one page variation or another, randomly.
Google Analytics’ Experiment code is probably the beefiest of all and it looks like this:
<!– Google Analytics Content Experiment code –>
<script>function utmx_section(){}function utmx(){}(function(){var
k=’stringofnumbers’,d=document,l=d.location,c=d.cookie;
if(l.search.indexOf(‘utm_expid=’+k)>0)return;
function f(n){if(c){var i=c.indexOf(n+’=’);if(i>-1){var j=c.
indexOf(‘;’,i);return escape(c.substring(i+n.length+1,j<0?c.
length:j))}}}var x=f(‘__utmx’),xx=f(‘__utmxx’),h=l.hash;d.write(
‘<sc’+’ript src=”‘+’http’+(l.protocol==’https:’?’s://ssl’:
‘://www’)+’.google-analytics.com/ga_exp.js?’+’utmxkey=’+k+
‘&utmx=’+(x?x:”)+’&utmxx=’+(xx?xx:”)+’&utmxtime=’+new Date().
valueOf()+(h?’&utmxhash=’+escape(h.substr(1)):”)+
‘” type=”text/javascript” charset=”utf-8″><\/sc’+’ript>’)})();
</script><script>utmx(‘url’,’A/B’);</script>
<!– End of Google Analytics Content Experiment code –>
You can play around with Visual Website Optimizer, Kissmetrics, Optimizely, LeadPages and so on. The basic principle is the same – the bit of code needs to be present on the Original Page so it knows from where to redirect people. Now, if you run a lot of tests (and you should), having to ask a developer for help each and every time you want to run an experiment can be taxing (time and budget-wise).
The simplest thing you can do to cut a lot of maintenance hours is a simple request: ask your dev team to add a feature to your CMS. You already have meta-data fields (if you don’t… you should). Have your devs add a similar field that injects any content present there in the page’s HTML structure, right before the </head> tag.
Depending on how the CMS was built, developing this might take them a while, but not too much. Expect at most a couple of hours.
Once they do that, you’ll be able to run your experiments without their help. Just pop-in the JS code in its designated field, configure your test in whatever A/B testing app you choose and you’re set.
