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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T17:15:16+00:00

I’ve recently learned about the new Google Analytics Content Experiments which looks interesting. (

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I’ve recently learned about the new Google Analytics Content Experiments which looks interesting. ( http://analytics.blogspot.nl/2012/06/helping-to-create-better-websites.html )

The standard usecase seems to be that for a certain page, say a product detail page, you supply variations (different urls) and select a percentage of users that are included in the test. Such a user will be presented a variation of the product-detail page (and will continue to be presented the same variation over and over for continuation/ux reasons, based on cookies presumably) .

All fine and good.

However, say I have 100 products on my site. Just testing a variation on 1 of those products has imho the following disadvantages:

  • slow progressing tests because of lower nr of visitors.
  • the test isn’t isolated. I.e: since other product detail pages aren’t included in the test, displaying a variation-page for 1 product-detail page while all other product-detail pages show the original can (will) lead to a confusing experience (and thus skewed conversion statistics) for the user that browses multiple products, which most of them do.

To me it seems far better to be able to dynamically include all products of a certain type into the same test (e.g: all TV’s) , for example by enabling to set some regular expression or other filter on urls to include in the test.

Is such a thing possible currently, scheduled, useful, or completely missing the point?

EDIT

Part of the solution seems to be “relative urls”
https://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2664470

Taking the previous example one step further, we can see how the use
of relative URLs lets you easily run an experiment on a set of
different original pages, and test visual alternatives across that
group of pages (e.g., the product pages in an e-commerce site).

Remaining question: How to dynamically tag which pages belong to the experiment (e.g: based on regex)

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The solution is to use relative url for the variation page.

    E.g. you have a number of product pages:

    www.mysite.com/products/eggs.html
www.mysite.com/products/cheese.html
www.mysite.com/products/bread.html
etc.

    For each page you have a matching variation page:

    www.mysite.com/products/eggs.html?var=bigpicture
www.mysite.com/products/cheese.html?var=bigpicture
www.mysite.com/products/bread.html?var=bigpicture
etc.

    You want to use all the product pages in 1 experiment.

    Go To google Analytics Content Experiments:
    For the orginal page choose ONE of the many product pages (e.g. http://www.mysite.com/products/eggs.html) (This is just to get the experiment code and provide GA with an example page)

    For the variation page choose relative url and put ?var=bigpicture

    Then place the javascript required for the experiment on ALL the original product pages you want in the experiment

    Google Content experiments Dynamic URL product pages

    For more information see: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2664470&topic=1745208&ctx=topic

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