Basic Question: Goals and Visitors

[#1]

I am currently testing out the Optimizely trial, and I have a couple basic questions for clarification:

The goals we’ve set up only trigger when a visitor comes in from one of the experiment URLs, correct? For example, most users will hit our Request Info thank-you page, but we only want the goal to trigger when they enter from the particular experiment URL we’re sending visitors through. It won’t trigger the goal anytime a visitor hits the TY page from any other URL/campaign, right?

In relation to this, we're going to have the Optimizely snippet sitting on these TY pages being called over and over again even if a visitor isn't part of the campaign (since it is sitting in the page head). Will that cause an issue?

Thanks!
Noah

[#2]

In order for a goal conversion to trigger, the visitor must be a part of an experiment. So, if a visitor arrives at the TY page via a flow that does not have a running experiment, this will *not* trigger a goal. Also, it's no problem that the snippet is on the page. The experiment will only run if the visitor meets the experiment targeting conditions.

It sounds like you've already put a fair amount of thought into your test! Out of curiosity, what are you thinking of testing and tracking??

[#3]

Hey Amanda,

Thanks for the clarification! We have a great deal of traffic hitting these TY pages, so it's good to know that only ones that went through a certain campaign will trigger the goals.

Right now we're just testing the waters by switching out some small bits of content on pages, ensuring that nothing breaks and all of the goals are tracked properly between the experiment versions. Once we are confident that everything works, we'll start doing much heavier tests like changing entire stylesheets, page structure, etc. Ideally, this is a fantastic way to see what works and doesn't, and incrementally move to newer designs based on real data as opposed to just jumping to a new template without testing performance compared to older templates.

Thank you for the reply!

Noah

[#4]

Very cool! Best of luck to you in your tests, and please continue to discuss your optimization ideas with us here in Optiverse. I'd love to hear how your first few tests go.