User guide

Setting Up Experiments - Standard Experiments

Setting Up Experiments

Background

Now that we see how GWO actually works down in the boiler room, let’s set up an experiment.

Section one, Standard Experiments, covers the simple scenario of a single test page and a single conversion

page on a single server.

In this scenario the content you want to test is static (though the page itself might be generated dynamically

with PHP or ASP.NET).

Section two,Non-Standard Experiments, covers more advanced scenarios for testing static content, such as:

• Dealing with development and production servers

• Dealing with pages that are not directly accessible (like those requiring a user to log in)

We won’t cover every single possible scenario, but the explanations you’ll ﬁnd here should give you enough

information to integrate GWO into your own speciﬁc environment.

In section two, we’re still assuming the content you want to test is static, but in section three,Experiments

with Dynamic Content, we explain what to do when the content you want to test has dynamic elements. This

might include, for example, testing a product detail page with variations on the product-speciﬁc information.

Standard Experiments

Here’s a jolly step-by-step example for setting up a simple experiment.

This example iskept simple on purpose. In later sections we’ll dig deeper into what GWO does in each step

of the setup process, and talk about how to rig up more advanced scenarios.

Setting up an MVT experiment

Let’s say you’re testing a lead sign-up form (found at http://www.mysite.com/sign-up.html) and

yourconversion page is http://ww w.mysite.com/thank-you.html.

Let’s also say you want to test two parts of the page:

• The headline

• The call-to-action text in the submit button

Step 1: Set up test and goal pages

• Name your experiment. For example: Sign-up Form Test

• Set your test page URL:http://www.mysite.com/sign-up.html

• Set your conversion page:http://www.mysite.com/thank-you.html

At this point GWO will try to retrieve the pages from your website to make sure the URLs are valid.