Unleashing the Power of VWO: Testing for Optimal Website Performance
If you develop or analyze web applications and have conducted various tests to improve page performance, you might encounter difficulties when dealing with large data sets or when determining the required number of samples for a particular test. If you want to streamline the process of performance testing to obtain real-time results, you may use one of the A/B test tools, one of them called VWO.
What is VWO?
VWO is a powerful and flexible platform that has emerged as a game-changer in this regard, offering businesses the ability to fine-tune their online presence through comprehensive testing methodologies.
VWO’s versatility stems from its ability to analyze website performance and offer actionable insights that can inform optimization strategies. By using VWO, businesses are empowered to achieve sustained growth and engagement by leveraging insights from data-driven testing methodologies. VWO’s comprehensive suite of tools and features allow businesses to streamline the optimization process and make data-driven decisions to further improve their online presence.
VWO isn’t just another tool; it’s a beacon of hope for businesses seeking to elevate their online impact. At its core, VWO offers a plethora of testing capabilities, from A/B tests to multivariate tests and split URL tests
How I Use The VWO ?
As a data analyst, I want to assess our web performance and determine which pages have better results. This can be done through methods such as A/B testing or comparing the performance of the old site versus the new site when we make changes to specific pages.
Sometimes, we manually collected variation and control data, conducted statistical analysis, and drew conclusions from our testing. With VWO, we can now conduct testing automatically and in real-time.
I will show you how we can conduct those tests on VWO
#Use Case 1: A/B Testing
several step you can user VWO for your A/B Test
Setting up pages for your test
This is the first and foremost step in creating your A/B test in VWO. Here, you specify the hypothesis, define the page URLs, and configure the visitor segments for your A/B test.
a. Setting URL : Define the URL of the pages you want to include in the test.
b. Define your visitor: Define the visitor that will be your control and variant in the A/B testing period. VWO gives you many kind of traffic segment or if you need the custom audience, VWO gives you custom segment.
also, don’t forget your allocation, allocation means you will set up the large of your sample in experiment, if you set by 100%, VWO will take all traffic that come from your segment to the experiments, it may cause lag in your website performance.
c. Set Control and variation: VWO give you seamless UI to help you determine the control and variation of your experiments. in this step you can determine how big your control and variation sample, is it 50:50 , 60:40 you can choose as your need.
In this step, you can also make a real time modification by using visual editor provided by VWO.
Adding conversion goals
Once your variations are ready, you can define the events you want to record a goal conversion in VWO. When a visitor performs the event you defined, VWO will record a goal conversion. For example, you can record goal conversion when users click on a link, visit pages, submit forms, and so on. To know more about adding conversion goals, refer to Adding Conversion Goals in VWO.
Finalizing your test
The last step in creating your A/B test is to configure the integration of VWO data with third-party products such as Google Analytics, etc. To know more about finalizing your test configurations, refer to Finalizing Your Test in VWO.
#Use Case 2: Split URL
Split URL Testing is the technique to test multiple variations of your website hosted on different URLs. Here, the website traffic is randomly split between the variations, and conversions are tracked to decide which variation performs the best.
several step VWO for your Split URL Test
Setting up pages for your test
This is the first and foremost step in creating your Split URL test in VWO. Here, you specify the hypothesis, define the URLs for control, variation, preview pages, and configure the visitor segments for your Split URL test.
Same with the A/B test, in the split URL, after you are done with the control and variation, you need to choose your traffic segment and traffic allocation.
Adding conversion goals
Once your variations are ready, you can define the events you want to record a goal conversion in VWO. When a visitor performs the event you defined, VWO will record a goal conversion.
Finalizing your test
The last step in creating your Split URL test is to configure configure the integration of VWO data with third-party products such as Google Analytics, etc. To know more about finalizing your test configurations, refer to Finalizing Your Test in VWO.
Things to Consider While Working with Split URL Testing in VWO
Describes the things that you need to consider while setting up Split URL tests in VWO.
- The control URL should be the one present on the site i.e. the users should land on the control URL and not the variation URL.
- If using a pattern, the variation pages corresponding to all control pages should exist, else it will return a 404 error.
- If the variation URL matches the control URL, there is a possibility of a user getting stuck in a loop if VWO chooses to show him the variation. In that case, a variation URL should be explicitly excluded.
- While creating a split test for multiple pages that do not have a common pattern, a custom URL or negative regex option can be used.
- If the split test is integrated with GA:
a. The control URL will have pageviews and sessions almost double the number of page views and sessions for variation.
NOTE: To prevent this, you can employ the method suggested here so that the GA code is not executed twice, thus preventing the page visits and sessions from getting doubled.
b. The variation URL will not have the traffic source information and will always show referral traffic.
c. The bounce rate of the site may increase or decrease depending on whether the variation is on the same domain or a different domain. - If VWO SmartCode is not present on the variation URL, it will not track conversions but will still track visits.
- If there is any internal redirection on the control or variation URL, the split test will not work correctly.
The Result of Your Experiment
In Here, the example how VWO can help you, so this is the report that you can get from using VWO
The summary report generated by VWO helps to determine whether your experiments or hypotheses have been successful or not. This is done by analyzing the improvement scores provided by VWO. The report is simple, fast, and provides all the necessary information needed to improve your website when running A/B tests.
Conclusion
By utilizing VWO, we can effortlessly automate our A/B testing, Split URL testing, and flexibility testing. Not only does this enable us to provide our users with real-time monitoring of both the variation and control groups, but it also allows us to draw conclusions with greater speed and confidence, thanks to the statistical results provided by VWO.
Wish this article serves as a comprehensive guide on how VWO works for A/B test automation in your environment, and how you can benefit from it. We are confident that you will find this information to be valuable. Thank you, and happy learning!
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