Due to slow page load speeds it is advised to keep tracking software to minimum when running mobile campaigns. This caused me a problem when trying to develop and optimise a mobile landing page. Because I wasn’t using prosper or any other tracking software I couldn’t plug in my custom multivariate testing scripts.
I was direct linking straight to Neverblue’s platform which has multiple subid’s. I decided the best way to optimse the lander would be to pass variables directly through to Neverblue and track them on their reporting system. I did this because it was a simple, effective and most importantly I feel its the fastest way of testing multiple parts of the page at the same time (in regards to page load times).
This is the basics of the script I used to setup the multivariate testing in php.
<?php
$out = ‘http://gnspf.com/click/?s=123456&c=78910&subid=1’.$_GET[‘s1’];
// h1 test
if (rand(0, 1) == 0) {
$h1 = ‘Hello World’; // set title
$out .= ‘&subid2=h1a’; // add a tag so its tracked
} else {
$h1 = ‘Welcome to my world’; // add second title
$out .= ‘&subid2=h1b’; // track with a different tag
}
// image test
if (rand(0, 1) == 0) {
$img = ‘picture1.jpg’;
$out .= ‘&subid3=pic1’; // use subid3 to track 2 parameters at the same time
} else {
$img = ‘picture2.jpg’;
$out .= ‘&subid3=pic2’;
}
// 3 button test – You can quite easily test a 100 buttons at once if you want to.
$r = rand(0, 2);
if ($r == 0) {
$button = ‘button1.jpg’;
$out .= ‘&subid4=but1’;
} elseif ($r == 1) {
$button = ‘button2.jpg’;
$out .= ‘&subid4=but2’;
} else {
$button = ‘button3.jpg’;
$out .= ‘&subid4=but3’;
}
?>
<html>
<h1><?php echo $h1; ?></h1>
<img src=”img/<?php echo $img; ?>” />
<a href=”<?php echo $out; ?>”><img src=”img/<?php echo $button; ?>” border=”0″ /></a>
</html>
So what this page is doing is setting up the basic tracking link as a variable $out. Then for each split test it adds a tracking tag to one of the additional subids. This means I can go into Neverblues or any other CPA network that has multiple subid tracking and check which header is performing better, which image is doing best and what button has the best CTA.
Everything is kept back end so there are no additional page load times, no javascript and no redirects. This php script runs faster than any tracking software because it’s so simple. You are limited to tracking 4 variables at a time plus your normal source/subid but this should be enough considering most mobile pages are quite basic.
Hope this helps someone.
