Integrating Visual Website Optimizer with Omniture SiteCatalyst

If you haven’t heard of Visual Website Optimizer then I suggest you go check them out now. Do it. Go! Check them out, then come back and read the rest of this post.

Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), currently in beta, is poised to be a real player in the optimization space. Their elegant design and drop-dead simple approach to designing, launching, and monitoring tests is just sexy, I don’t know how else to describe it.

I have been part of the beta team testing VWO for over a month now and, as you can probably tell, I am impressed. So impressed, that I wanted to pull my VWO data into Omniture SiteCatalyst and Omniture Discover to extend the value of the product even further.

The integration between VWO and Omniture was super simple.

Step 1: If you haven’t already done so, designate one of your Custom Conversion variables as your optimization tracking variable.

Step 2: Copy the following code snippte and paste it into the doPlugins section of your s_code.js file.

var _combination = _vis_opt_readCookie(‘_vis_opt_exp_’+_vis_opt_experiment_id+’_combi’);

if(typeof(_vis_opt_comb_name[_combination]) != “undefined”){
s.eVar1= _vis_opt_experiment_id + ‘:’ + _vis_opt_comb_name[_combination]
}

}

Step 3: That’s it!!!

NOTE: Using a similar approach, you can very easily integrate VWO with Google Analytics using ‘pageTracker._setCustomVar’.

I’m running an A|B test on the ‘Contact Jason’ section of my blog.

I’m testing if it’s best to show a photo of me or to show an icon of a telephone. When the integration code executes, my conversion variable is populated with the following:

s.eVar1=”Contact Icon:Photo”

‘Contact Icon’ is the site section that I’m testing and ‘Photo’ is the treatment version. For reference, you can see these values inside the details section of your test within VWO.

Although Visual Website Optimizer is still in it’s infancy, I see good things in their future. They really seem to value customer engagement and their product is sexy as hell.

P.S. I have a few beta invites to VWO, if you are interested, email me via my contact form.

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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