Google Website Optimizer v 1.0 The Techie Guide - Manual (Page 16)

16
The Techie Guide to Google Website Optimizer
Non-Standard Experiments
For the conversion page, locally create a dummy file (such as conversion_dummy_file.html) containing
nothing but the Conversion Script. This is especially helpful if the conversion page requires a purchase and
is hard to view without making an actual purchase. In any case, you’ll need to add the Conversion Script to
the real conversion page before you launch the experiment.
Step 3: Create variations
Once you’ve reached Step 3, creating variations is the same as in the simple scenario. If your variations
contain dynamic content, you can see how to set that up in the next section.
Step 4: Review and launch
This step should really be called “Review, preview and launch”.
While GWO used your own local files to help during the experiment setup stage, by this point you should
have all the GWO code in place so it appears in the HTML source on an actual web server. If you have access
to the test page from your own PC (for instance, on a development server that is not publicly accessible), the
preview function will work fine. The preview function calls the page based on the URL you provided in Step
1, and adds a string that looks like a local anchor (starting with #).
For example, to preview: http://dev.mysite.com/product_page.php?pid=123
GWO will use a URL that looks like this:
http://de v.mysite.com/product_page.php?pid=123#utmxid=EAAAACmLHKpzyPXnHnp
og9gHi14;utmxpreview=0-0-0;utmxreload=1
Experiment ID is an alpha numeric sequence ( AgAAAIuElaplZk1wAusMbP0ZUYo, for example). To find
this ID, open the Website Optimizer preview page for your experiment; the value of the query parameter
experiment is the experiment ID.
Combination is the combination you want to preview. It is a sequence of numbers, separated by dashes. Each
number represents a page section in your experiment, and the value of each number identifies the variation.
For example, if your experiment has three sections, the combination 2-0-1 specifies the second variation of
the first section, the original of the second section, and the first variation of the third section. Variation order
is determined by the order of the Section Scripts on the test page. To see the original combination for an
experiment with four sections, you would specify 0-0-0-0.
For example:
http://ww w.mysite.com/product_page#utmxid=EAAAAOYh8q79WlRUYLWrG7ax48I;utm
xpreview=0-2-0
Once you’ve appended the preview string to your test page URL, you’ll need to force a refresh to get the
browser to fetch the requested variation. This can usually be achieved by hitting CTRL+F5 in the browser.
(The forced refresh is necessary because the specified combination appears after a ‘#’ symbol and is not
considered part of the cacheable URL.)
If the test page is not directly accessible within the GWO preview, you can copy and paste the “preview
string” and append it to the live page. Let’s say you set up the experiment on a dev server and provided
URLs for the dev server during the experiment setup, then copied the GWO code to the live server. In that
case, before launching the experiment you can copy the files to the production server and then replace the
preview URLs with ones for production.