Split A/B Testing
Article Topics: Sites, Program, Tour
This page will describe a specific type of site/tour redirect, that can be used to accomplish A/B Testing, also known as Split Testing.
Scenario
Suppose on one of your sites you have a tour that seems to be working pretty well for you, but you would like to know if a different tour may work even better. The way to accomplish this would be to create a redirect that sends 50% of the traffic from one tour (Tour A) to a new tour (Tour B), and then after letting both tours run for a little while, check the stats to see which tour had performed better for you and your affiliates.
If either the intended tour A or tour B already exists (or if they both already exist), you can copy those tours to new tours (with the same tour URLs), and use these new copies of those tours for the Split A / B testing.
For more information on creating a new tour, see "How to Add a New Tour"
Step 1
Since we want all of the Tour B traffic to only come from what is being split by the 50-50 redirect, the first thing we need to do is make Tour B hidden. To hide your second tour (i.e. tour B), navigate to the Sites Admin and select Tour B, which we will be hiding the linkcodes for.
Under the Tour "Details" tab, change the "Hidden" option to "Yes."
This will prevent any affiliates from grabbing any linkcodes that go directly to this tour. Instead, they will only be able to get linkcodes for tour A, the traffic for which will then be split 50-50 "behind the scenes" with Tour B, which will be accomplished by the redirect we are going to set up next.
Step 2
The next step is to configure the redirects for your Site.
See "Configuring Redirects" for an extensive look at setting up Redirects in NATS.
Setting the correct values in the above "Add New Redirect" form
This is what you will set in the "Add New Redirect" form for each of the following fields:
New Program: Leave this set to "No Change".
New Site: Leave this set to "No Change".
New Tour: Set this field to the tour name that you are using as tour B (i.e. this is the DESTINATION of the redirect).
Redirect: Click Use New (Site) Tour checkbox.
Active for: Set this to 50% of traffic.
Track redirect: Check this box, because you will want to track the traffic that is going through this redirect.
Enable by default: DO NOT Check this box.
Disable Original Hit: Disables traffic being recorded for the tour being redirected away from.
Click "Add This Redirect" once you are done filling out the required fields.
Step 3
Now that you have configured your new redirect, you will then have to add a rule for this newly added redirect. We now will need to add a Rule to make it redirect traffic, but only from Tour A.
Navigate to the Rules tab for this redirect, and click the "Add New" button. it will open a Rules form as shown below. Since this redirect was not active by default, we are going to set an "Enable" rule, but only for traffic that comes from Tour A. Everything else in this Rule we will leave set to "ALL":
Click the "Add Rule" button at the bottom of the page.
That's it, you're done! Once you have done this, you will be left with just the one affiliate link code for tour A, and this redirect you have created will now randomly redirect 50% of your surfers from Tour A to Tour B.
And then after you have allowed your tours to split up the traffic equally on both tours for a while, you will be able to see the individual stats for each tour or site in the Reporting Admin. This can help with seeing which of your tours is better at converting referred surfers into members, as well as seeing what surfer/member behaviors are associated more with each tour or site.
(Please note, there are also other ways to accomplish A/B testing, such as with different billers, where you could set up multiple cascades with the same exact description, and if they both have the same weight, the cascades will be split 50-50. And there are also Program Redirects available).
Additional Notes
Redirecting Programs
When creating a new redirect, you could change the program as well, but all of the same affiliates would have to be enabled in the new program -- as in all the programs that send traffic to tour A including cascade and join option rules would have to allow these programs as well, and the affiliates may get upset that they are receiving a different payout than what they expected with the tour A program.
Enabling a Redirect by Default
It is advised to leave this option unchecked because that would mean that the redirect would be enabled by default, which in turn would mean that half of any traffic to this site, from any tour, would go tour B (e.g. You could have 10 other tours for this site, but you only want to split the traffic between tours 11 and 12 as the 50-50 A/B test). So instead, leave it unchecked and we will use rules in the next step to allow this redirect to work only for traffic that comes from tour A.
Disabling Original Hit
NATS provides an available extra check box on the redirect form for "Disable Original Hit", which if checked, will disable recording a hit on a tour that is being redirected away from. Without this feature being checked, the total number of hits gets counted on tour A. For example, without this feature being checked, if 100 visitors go to tour A, and half of those end up going to tour A but the other half end up being redirected to tour B, the stats will record this as 100 hits on tour A and 50 hits on tour B. But with this feature being checked, it ignores the total number of hits that were initially for tour A, and only records those that actually ended up there after the redirect. For example, with this feature being checked, if 100 visitors go to tour A, and half of those end up going to tour A but the other half end up being redirected to tour B, the stats will record this as 50 hits on tour A and 50 hits on tour B.
Related Articles
How to Configure RedirectsReportingSitesTour OverviewLast updated
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