A/B Testing with Google Analytic Custom Variables

Question

I'm trying to do some AB testing. In particular, I want to use Google Analytics (GA) custom variables to track which variant a user saw, so I want 3 levels; one level to specify the category of testing (image, popup, etc.), then the page they're on, and the value is whether they saw variant A or variant B.

Looking at custom variables, it seems that _setCustomVar only takes two attributes; a key and a value. How would I go about doing this?

Note: I want to avoid using the GA Multivariate testing module which redirects the user.

Answer 1

hkpeprah, I think you should be fine with CustomVars as one of the attributes is already available to you -- page dimension.

If you set CustomVar on session or visitor scope, you will have the values for a given test available for all the hits that get sent during a visit (including all the events and e-commerce transactions).

Still I would suggest testing only one page so that you can be sure what changes actually caused any lift/drop in conversion rate. Running multiple test at the same time is not the best way to go (unless you can segment traffic so there is no overlaps, of course).

Hope this helps.