Simple Content Experiments

As of August 2019, Google no longer allows new Experiments using the Experiments API.

So this project will not get updated.

Please use Google Optimize.

As part of Analytics, Google offers a free content testing service called Google Experiments.

NOTE: Google is deprecating Analytics Content Experiments.

Google Optimize is the free, preferred way to run experiments. Analytics Content Experiments remain available but are being deprecated in the future.

We are currently supporting this plugin, but will discontinue support as the Content Experiments API becomes deprecated.

In the simple (page) form of Google Experiments, the user is redirected to a separate page which contains the variation. There are a number of plugins that can help you implement this scheme.

The Simple Content Experiments plugin implements the “Client-side” model described in Content Experiments Without Redirects (Browser-only implementation)
This scheme is more complicated to set up, but allows more flexibility.
The Simple Content Experiments plugin allows you to define sections within a single page that contain multiple variations with simple shortcodes..
For example, you can test if one call-to-action image gets more clicks than another.

To use this plugin, you will need:

1. Google Universal Analytics installed on your site
2. A Content Experiment
3. Your experiment ID (Will be displayed when setting up the experiment above.)

Sample content experiment:

 [experiment id="EXPERIMENT ID"] [ex_variant] content for first variation [/ex_variant] [ex_variant] content for second variation [/ex_variant] [/experiment] 

Features:

• Allows in-page variations. You don’t need to create a whole page for each variation
• Simple shortcode syntax
• Uses Google Experiments API to determine which user sees which variation
• Adds class (“xvariantclick”) and custom data attribute (“data-xvariant”) which can be used for Analytics event goals and tracking

Goals and Tracking:

Anchors within an experiment variation get an additional class: “xvariantclick”
This class can be used with Google Tag Manager to create a rule that responds to clicks on those elements.

Note: If you are using Google Tag Manager, you need to create a trigger and tag to have the Experiment run properly.
See the section called “Google Tag Manager” for information on how to set this up.

Google Analytics Experiments:

To track clicked items within an experiment, use these new events in your goal definitions.
You can look for an event where Category = “experiment” or whatever you named your category above.

Debugging

You can enable JavaScript console log debugging messages by adding the following to your wp-config.php file:

/** Enable console log debugging messages for the Simple Content Experiments plugin: */ define('WPSCE_DEBUG', true); 

Google Tag Manager

As simple as “Simple Content Experiments” is, Google Optimize is even simpler. And the recommended solution if you’re running GTM.

But if you still want to use the old Content Experiments, you can. (For now.)
When running Google Tag Manager, sometimes the Experiments API will run before Analytics is loaded and ready.

Don’t worry if that is just programmer-speak, you just need to add a new Tag and Trigger.
Obviously, none of this applies if you’re not running Tag Manager.

Trigger

Name:

I called mine “AnalyticsLoaded” but you can name it whatever you want.

Choose Event:

“Page View”

Configure Trigger:

“Window Loaded”

Fire On:

“All Page Views”

Tag

Name:

Whatever you want. I called mine “SimpleExperimentPlugin”

Choose Product:

“Custom HTML” tag

Configure Tag:

<script> if("function" == typeof(content_experiment.run_experiment)){ content_experiment.run_experiment(); } </script> 

Fire On:

“AnalyticsLoaded” or whatever you named the trigger above.

Requirements

• Google Analytics (Universal Analytics)
• This version of the plugin requires jQuery 1.6 or higher.

While jQuery is probably already available in your theme, in the unlikely event that it isn’t, you can use a plugin like WP jQuery Plus to add it to your site.