Crownpeak WCO: A/B Testing & Personalisation
Posted by: Merin Valiyaparambil
What is A/B testing? This is a way to display different versions of same web page, with minor differences. On page request, any of the configured variant will be shown to the requester.
Purpose: Facilitates analyzing which of the page versions can attract more user interaction, engagement and eventually business conversion.
Crownpeak features WCO (Web Content Optimizer) which does exactly what we need here. Create a single page with content variations and publish as a single URL, WCO then shows different pages based on options configured.
With this background of AB Testing, lets see how we can implement this in Crownpeak:
Identify which part/content of the page we want to customize for A/B Testing. In our example here lets create different Page Headers. Create different versions of the page using WCO.
1) In the Input template add a Textbox. With the below code enable WCO for this textbox:
2) Create an asset from this template and open in form view; it will look like below:
3) Now create a snippet for this WCO control. Snippet acts as a holder of data source for WCO. To create it click on the Create Snippet Link and a pop-up like below will appear:
4) Name the snippet like wcoheader test. This creates the snippet with a default variant with same name. Note that this snippet will automatically get attached to WCO control as shown in the below:
5) Now create the testing Variant for AB Testing. Click “Add Testing Variant” as shown below:
6) This will ask for variant name. Create two variants, name them First Header & Second header.
7) Enter Page Header value for both the variants.
8) Configure “Variant Weighting” for the variants - which determines how often a particular variant will be displayed. Click the Setting icon.
9) On the dialog box that opens, configure the percent for each variant as desired, per below screenshot:
10) Note that the first is the default variant and will be ignored if we set its value to 0. For other two variants we created “Header One” & “Header Two” lets assign them 50. This way, if the page is requested 100 times, both variants will be shown 50 times each.
11) Running Analytics Report
Reports can be viewed and generated by selecting the Apps icon in the UI and selecting WCO(Volte View).
In WCO Reports section, each snippet has the following available reports:
Dashboard (Overview)
Referrers
Keywords
Field Results
Submission Data
Report Dashboard looks like
12) Additional References:
https://www.crownpeak.com/videos_a-b-testing-and-analytics_product-demo-video
Personalisation
Personalization can be achieved through WCO Targeting variants. It can be based on below parameters or divided into below categories
Users Location
Users Info / Forms Data (Age/Gender/Industries )
Browser or Device Type
Referrer / Source Website
Third Party Integration
In Case of AB testing we have created Testing Variant but in case of personalisation we’ll be creating Targeting Variant.
Steps to configure Targeting Variants
1) Create a template and add in a text field with WCO controls in the input template.
2) Create an asset using the template. Fields will look like below
3) To create a snippet, click on “Create Snippet” and enter a name. If you already have a snippet then, select the snippet through “Select snippet” option.
4) You’ll find that the created snippet is attached to the field. Now add in targeting variants using the option highlighted as below.
5) Name the variant and select a targeting group. Jump to step 7, or create one using step 6.
6) To create a targeting group, click on “Create Targeting Group”. This displays a dialog box with a “New Group” button and list of existing groups. Add a group by clicking on “New Group” button and name it, for example “Device Targeting Variants”. As an example, we are going to create variants of device category.
Variant categories are on the left, choose the ones we intend to use by dragging-dropping them on the drag here section.
Edit the category from Edit option, save after customizing - as shown below.
7) Once saved successfully, select the created targeting group
By default, a variant of the snippet name is also created and is made visible to all users.
8) We can add more variants using “Add Variant” option, highlighted below.
9) We can change the targeting variants settings by clicking on the highlighted option.
10) Add content to the variant and Save the asset.
We have now successfully created a Targeting variant using a WCO Snippet. Create additional variants based on the requirements. In this example, the Title text will be visible based on meeting the criteria defined within Targeting group.