Has anyone successfully integrated Google Website Optimizer with an Umbraco site? I have a potential build coming up that may require this and would be interested in any comments or ideas on how to implement this within an Umbraco site. I have no previous experience of GWO but from my basic understanding of it could be difficult to achieve with Umbraco. The requirement would require many of the document type properties to be wrapped in GWO scripts.
I tried it once, very short, did not put very much effort in it, but from what I can remember you insert some JS code in your page. In umbraco you would create different templates. In GWO management you put the different URLs in. One for the original page and the other with the ?template=othertemplate option. (don't know if this is the exact parameter).
It's not that difficult, we do it on a few of our Umbraco sites. The main thing is to build your site and templates with that kind of stuff in mind.
For example we have a base bage document type that all of the page types inherit from that has an SEO/Tracking tab that contains multiline text fields that allow you to drop code in the various place on a page where you might want to drop tracking code (header, beginning of body, end of body), that way you can drop the optimiser code onto the pages easily.
For simple page stuff, if it's global, you can just add the wrapping code into the template through umbraco. For individual pages, if it's just one page, you can drop the code into the template, if its a template used on many pages, just create a copy with the code in and set the page to use the special one.
For split testing, we just create an alternate template and use alternate template syntax to create the page link. So if the page is mysite.com/contact we might have mysite.com/contact/newdesign and so forth.
Mike/Tim, thanks for the feedback that is exactly what I was hoping to hear. Tim, so that I am sure I understand you correctly, I could add an additional tab for editors which would essentially provide a duplicate of existing document properties but would allow for editors to add their alternate content for split testing? As the editors are non-technical they would merely want to manage the content to be used in split testing.
Ah, sadly it won't create the alternate templates from the tab, you'd have to do that using the templates section in the settings area. Having javascript code in the tabs would mean they could add the bulk of the tracking code themselves, but they'd still need to create modify templates unfortunatley!
If it was just page content they wanted to change, they could create a copy of the page, hide it from the navigation using the umbracoNaviHide property, and then use that as the alternate page. But if they were testing UI chnages, you'd have to change the templates. The agency I freelance at manage all of the optimiser testing for our clients, we wouldn't normally want them dropping in code without knowing what they were doing. We've got the analysts trained up on how to do it so that they can set up the tests that they come up with, and they only need to get one of the dev's invloved it's a fairly major UI/Functionality change that they want to try out.
Integrating Google Website Optimizer
Has anyone successfully integrated Google Website Optimizer with an Umbraco site? I have a potential build coming up that may require this and would be interested in any comments or ideas on how to implement this within an Umbraco site. I have no previous experience of GWO but from my basic understanding of it could be difficult to achieve with Umbraco. The requirement would require many of the document type properties to be wrapped in GWO scripts.
Thanks, Simon
I tried it once, very short, did not put very much effort in it, but from what I can remember you insert some JS code in your page. In umbraco you would create different templates. In GWO management you put the different URLs in. One for the original page and the other with the ?template=othertemplate option. (don't know if this is the exact parameter).
It's not that difficult, we do it on a few of our Umbraco sites. The main thing is to build your site and templates with that kind of stuff in mind.
For example we have a base bage document type that all of the page types inherit from that has an SEO/Tracking tab that contains multiline text fields that allow you to drop code in the various place on a page where you might want to drop tracking code (header, beginning of body, end of body), that way you can drop the optimiser code onto the pages easily.
For simple page stuff, if it's global, you can just add the wrapping code into the template through umbraco. For individual pages, if it's just one page, you can drop the code into the template, if its a template used on many pages, just create a copy with the code in and set the page to use the special one.
For split testing, we just create an alternate template and use alternate template syntax to create the page link. So if the page is mysite.com/contact we might have mysite.com/contact/newdesign and so forth.
Hope that helps!
:)
Mike/Tim, thanks for the feedback that is exactly what I was hoping to hear. Tim, so that I am sure I understand you correctly, I could add an additional tab for editors which would essentially provide a duplicate of existing document properties but would allow for editors to add their alternate content for split testing? As the editors are non-technical they would merely want to manage the content to be used in split testing.
Cheers, Simon
Ah, sadly it won't create the alternate templates from the tab, you'd have to do that using the templates section in the settings area. Having javascript code in the tabs would mean they could add the bulk of the tracking code themselves, but they'd still need to create modify templates unfortunatley!
If it was just page content they wanted to change, they could create a copy of the page, hide it from the navigation using the umbracoNaviHide property, and then use that as the alternate page. But if they were testing UI chnages, you'd have to change the templates. The agency I freelance at manage all of the optimiser testing for our clients, we wouldn't normally want them dropping in code without knowing what they were doing. We've got the analysts trained up on how to do it so that they can set up the tests that they come up with, and they only need to get one of the dev's invloved it's a fairly major UI/Functionality change that they want to try out.
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