WordPress and Drupal are the most popular CMSes on Earth as they power a lot of business and personal websites. These CMSes have been game changing because they enable anyone can setup and manage a website easily without ever touching HTML or messing up with technical issues. However, if you need to do A/B or multivariate tests on such CMSes, then it is not exactly a piece of cake. All the technical issues (inserting code, tagging page, etc.) associated with setting up a test completely defeat the spirit of CMS. Separation of content from code is the first place why one uses a CMS thus running an A/B test on it shouldn’t require any messing up with code.
Because we realize the pains associated with creating A/B tests on CMSes, we are proud to announce two new Visual Website Optimizer plugins for WordPress and Drupal. With these plugins, you do not need to touch even a single line of code on your website to create and run A/B or multivariate tests. The real power comes from the fact that if you have these plugins enabled you can create unlimited number of tests from VWO without any sort of page tagging. Simply activate the plugin and you are all set for increasing your sales and conversions.
WordPress Plugin Instructions
This plugin is made by Andy Bailey of CommentLuv. Thanks for your effort Andy!
Drupal Plugin Instructions
Update: Thanks to Ted Cooper, there is now a plugin in Drupal repository which you can use (instead of downloadable plugin below): http://drupal.org/project/visual_website_optimizer
This plugin is made by Will Ronco of Awesome Software. Thanks Will!
We will be adding support for more CMSes soon. If you have a CMS and you want to experience the smoothest and easiest A/B testing on it, let us know. We will make a plugin for your CMS too.
Note: currently, this integration does not work with asynchronous code aspect (which is in beta). Whenever asynchronous code comes out of beta, it will support Google Analytics integration.
It is #1 feature requested and here you have it. This blog post introduces the new plugin for the Google Analytics. Using the plugin, you can easily benchmark multiple metrics across different variations. For example, you may find out that while your winning variation has reduced bounce rate significantly, it may actually be reducing average visitor time on site as well. Viewing results from multiple perspectives allows one to get a better idea on the expected behavior of winning variation.
For integrating Google Analytics with Visual Website Optimizer, you will have to sandwich a snippet of code (in bold font below) in your existing Google Analytics tracking code (most likely present at the bottom of your website HTML):
<script type="text/javascript"> var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("XX-XXXXXX-X"); pageTracker._initData(); if (typeof(_vis_opt_GA_track) == "function") { _vis_opt_GA_track(); } pageTracker._trackPageview(); </script>
The process for Asynchronous code snippet is similar:
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'XX-XXXXXX-X']); if(typeof(_vis_opt_GA_track) == "function") { _vis_opt_GA_track(); } _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
In other words, the code in bold (javascript function _vis_opt_GA_track()) needs to be added just before the Google Analytics code snippet _trackPageview
After you have added the code, the integration is done. No more settings, no more configuration. For all tests, the Google Analytics intergration will start automatically.
To see A/B test reports in Google Analytics, click on Visitors in the sidebar and then click on Custom Variables report. Then click on the test id (available from VWO reports page) corresponding to the test you want to see a report for. An example of the report name in GA would be “VWO-2” which means it is a report corresponding to test with id 2. In the report you can see goal values for different variations plus you can also see different metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, return visit, pages/visit, etc. corresponding to the variations. The reports look something like the following screenshot (click to expand):
As you can see, different variations have different bounce rate and time on site. If we had configured goals in GA for this site, we could have tracked performance of variations on multiple goals as well. We can also define an advanced segment for a variation to do any kind of complex analysis that GA allows us to do. How cool!
Before you get too excited, please note following important points regarding the plugin:
Technical note:VWO uses GA’s 4th custom variable slot by default. If you would like to change it (either because you already use if for a different purpose or you want to track multiple tests in GA), add the following code before any GA code:
<script type="text/javascript"> var _vis_opt_GA_slot = YOUR_CUSTOM_SLOT; // a number between 1-5 </script>
Leave a comment here if you cannot get the plugin to work for you or you have trouble understanding what code to add or where to add.
