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Best Practices for AB Testing Engagement
Best Practices for AB Testing Engagement
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Here's what I'm doing and where I need help,
I start in Google Analytics and find the highest trafficked pages with bounce rates between 75-100%. I sort by page views highest to lowest, and start to identify the best pages to improve.
Now I want to use Optimizely to AB test to REDUCE the bounce rate. What's the best goal to use in optmizely to accomplish this? Is there a bounce goal? I didn't find the answer on either of these pages:
https://help.optimizely.com/hc/en-us/articles/200039915-Goals-Overview
https://help.optimizely.com/hc/en-us/articles/200039925
Thank you for creating this community!
-Chris
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cofounder, Noble Creative.
http://withnoble.com
#fortheloveofacronyms
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As BRYANTJAQUEZ noted, integrate Optimizely with GA through custom variables to track bounce rate by variation. It might be better to choose a success metric that aligns more closely to your end business metric (such as a lead form sign-up, checkout, etc) - by improving a micro-conversion such as bounce rate, you might simply be shifting abandonment to another step further down the funnel, and not necessarily improving your bottom line.
twitter.com/cometrico
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Very good stuff! Thank you for sharing!
"It might be better to choose a success metric that aligns more closely to your end business metric"
I think I may be using optimizely in a fashion normally not intended. This is for SEO!
I want to AB test pages to improve their bounce rates. The idea is that a lower bounce rate = better serp rankings. Since I'll be running this test on my pages that rank between 4-10 in the search results, it could be something that directly improves revenue due to the boost in highly valuable organic traffic.
I think some "ok" metrics to use a goal for the experiment would be time on page (x>5s), scroll depth (1-100), or just good old bounce rate.
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Suppose the URL you are optimizing for bounce rate is https://www.optimizely.com/pricing. This regular expression will match any URL on the website except for /pricing: https\:\/\/www\.optimizely\.com(?!\/pricing)
The regex is a negative lookahead explained in more detail here: http://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html
This regex goal will tell you if the variation is better than the control at getting a visitor to another page on the site. It's almost the same thing as bounce rate, but without the time aspect.
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I do apreciate that tip, it is not the ideal solution however.
Bounce rate is already a poor measurement of engagement, so this would not be helpful in this particular situation. It may be helpful in another scenario, or for others so for that I thank you! It is a good tip to know.
I use a lot of event tracking in Google Analytics. This helps me exclude visits from the bounce rate when visitors watch a video, flip through an image gallery, or complete any other task that does not generate a new url. If only optimizley could use the Google Analytics "rules" for bounce rates for each page, taking GA events into consideration.
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Hi Kyle,
I'm familiar with the engagement goal and to be honesy I do not like it.
Someone clicking on a page is not a good measurement of engagement.
If I had a video with a play button, or an image gallery, that might work.
But it will be different for every page and using a click universally as a goal means that the results will not provide very good insights in most cases.
Correct me if I'm wrong, or if I'm overthinking something, but just because someone clicks on a page doesn't mean they're engaged.
That's why using GA events would be great. I customize the bounce rate for EVERY page of my website, because that's the way you get the best measurement of how people are interacting with your site.
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More on custom events here: https://help.optimizely.com/hc/en-us/articles/200039925-Tracking-custom-event-goals
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