How do you separate visitors to two intro pages to compare amt of registration per visitor?

Question

Hi. I am making a site that depend on users to register to be able to play my online game. If they don't login they only get to see the intro page.

If the user login to the site I will save this information to the cookie so next time they visit they will be sent directly to the login.php. If the user don't have this information in the cookie they will be sent to intro.php.

Of course I want as many users as possible to register (Or in this case, as high percent as possible). To do this I want to separate 50% of the users to intro1.php and the other 50% to intro2.php. Then I want to compare the amount/percent of users that clicks on the registration.php link and how many that click away from the site.

I want to have a statistic of exactly what percent of visitors that go from intro1.php to registration.php and exactly what percent that go from intro2.php to registration.php. This way I can compare the success rate of my intro1.php and intro2.php and improve my intro page. How can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

Google A/B test seams to be a good solution for you ... take a look at www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

Answer 2

You're referring to A/B testing. You could do this server-side, like thus:

<?php
$rand = mt_rand(1,2);
include_once('includes/login'.$rand.'.tpl.php');
?>

The above basically picks a number (between 1 or 2, inclusive) and then includes either includes/login1.tpl.php or includes/login2.tpl.php. No need to depend on the URL then, and all uses see login.php or whatever because the template used is picked server-side.

Of course, with the above, you'd also want to include some way of tracking your results. This could be a simple pixel tracking image (a 1×1 pixel image that has a URL to a script as opposed to an image as it's src attribute). For example:

<img src="includes/track.php?login=1" alt="" width="1" height="1" />
<img src="includes/track.php?login=2" alt="" width="1" height="1" />

Or you could use the Google Analytics approach as mentioned above.

Hope this gives you food for thought.

Answer 3

This is called AB testing. There are lots of 3rd party systems available for this. Others mentioned GA (Google Analytics) but that is not right. GA measures activity but it does not actually split traffic or compare traffic that is split up.

However, Google does offer AB testing through GWO (Google Website Optimizer).

Omniture Test & Target is another popular AB testing medium.

If you have the funds, I suggest you hire an Analytics consultant. There are a lot of companies out there that are dedicated to setting up AB and MV tests, as well as tracking in general, and they also provide analytics servics for the data received.