Using events as page section usage

Question

I'm currently researching a solution to monitor the performance of specific sections of a page. For example, you have a simple page with 2 images with links to other pages. You are driving lots of traffic to this page and you are experimenting with different contents on that page.

6 months after, you want to see which section of the page performed better with what kind of specific imges.

Let's imagine you require a report that should tell you the following: on average, the first spot performs better, but last week the image was bad and that's why you had less conversion from that spot.

I'd like to use such a system on a high-traffic homepage of an eCommerce website, in order to better monitor the usage of the selling spots.

I was thinking to use Google Analytics events with a positioning scheme (splitting the website in columns and rows, giving to each cell an identification ID such as a1 for column a, row 1) and keeping a local datawarehouse of creatives (images, promotions etc.), but apparently, after 10.000.000 hits per month, Analytics is recommending the premium version which is quite pricey (12k USD per month, 1 year upfront payment).

I was thinking about PIWIK as an alternative, but there is no event tracking there - or am I missing anything?

Looking forward to hearing your input on this matter.

Answer 1

You're better off with a provider like Optimizely for this use case. Still gonna be expensive, but it'll more quickly get you the information you need to make decisions.

Answer 2

We normally use multi variation tests or A/B tests to measure the success of user interfaces. Google Analytics have this feature and it is free.

This links maybe useful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDWTMOC_Dp4

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745147?hl=en