Make the Most of A/B Website Testing with Coremetrics Reporting

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Services Team

If you’re ready to begin doing A/B testing on your site there are a number of good options available to track performance in Coremetrics reporting.

For Homepage Testing
Implement Page View tags with distinct Page IDs that flag each test version.
For example, Page ID = Homepage A, Page ID = Homepage B. Test version performance can be analyzed by using the following reports – Page Categories, Clickstream, TruePath, Report Segments or Explore.

For Product Page Testing
Implement Product View tags with distinct Page IDs that flag each test version.
For example, Page ID = Product: Denim Jeans A, Page ID = Product: Denim Jeans B. Test version performance can be analyzed by using the following reports – Product Categories, Clickstream, TruePath, Report Segments or Explore.

For Onsite Link and Promotion Testing
Real Estate tagging parameters can be implemented on specific links on a page to test performance and the placement. The test version can be flagged in one of the Real Estate parameter values. For example, cm_re=topleft-_-versionA-_-registerlink. Test version performance can be analyzed in the following reports – Real Estate, Report Segments or Explore.

Site Promotions tagging parameters can be implemented to test onsite promotions that exist across multiple pages on a website. By implementing Site Promotion tags you can analyze the performance, creative and placement of onsite promotions for each test version. The test version can be flagged in one of the Site Promotions parameter values. For example, cm_sp=topnav-_-versionB-_-freeshippingpromo. Test version performance can be analyzed in the following reports – Site Promotions, Report Segments or Explore.

Explore
Finally, Explore Attribute can be used to flag a test version without having to implement additional tags. For example, if you were conducting an A/B test for a Shoes landing page, in the Page View tag the Page ID = Shoes LP and in Explore attribute field 1 = Version A or Version B. You may report, filter and segment on this attribute value in Explore reporting. Further, collecting attributes has no impact on server call volumes.

For those of you using Google Website Optimizer for testing you can learn more about Coremetrics integration by checking out the best practices guide on the Coremetrics Customer Support website. Once on the site search for “A/B Testing Guide”.

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  • Steve Fernandez

    I’ve always found it interesting how most users do not consider implementing logic to adjust data, in this case Page ID, that is sent in the tags. I guess it’s mental block that the homepage is called Homepage, and why would you want to change that. In the early days of analytics, I had our homepage called Homepage if the referring domain was not ours. If the referring domain was ours, meaning they came back to the homepage from within the site, I used a different name. This gave me clarity in pagestream reports to better identify what was going on.

    Real Estate and Promotional tags were invaluable for measuring performance of merchandising blocks on the homepage as A/B testing of the primary marketing message block.