I've recently learned about the new Google Analytics Content Experiments which looks interesting. ( http://analytics.blogspot.nl/2012/06/helping-to-create-better-websites.html )
The standard usecase seems to be that for a certain page, say a product detail page, you supply variations (different urls) and select a percentage of users that are included in the test. Such a user will be presented a variation of the product-detail page (and will continue to be presented the same variation over and over for continuation/ux reasons, based on cookies presumably) .
All fine and good.
However, say I have 100 products on my site. Just testing a variation on 1 of those products has imho the following disadvantages:
To me it seems far better to be able to dynamically include all products of a certain type into the same test (e.g: all TV's) , for example by enabling to set some regular expression or other filter on urls to include in the test.
Is such a thing possible currently, scheduled, useful, or completely missing the point?
EDIT
Part of the solution seems to be "relative urls" https://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2664470
Taking the previous example one step further, we can see how the use of relative URLs lets you easily run an experiment on a set of different original pages, and test visual alternatives across that group of pages (e.g., the product pages in an e-commerce site).
Remaining question: How to dynamically tag which pages belong to the experiment (e.g: based on regex)
Thanks.
The solution is to use relative url for the variation page.
E.g. you have a number of product pages:
www.mysite.com/products/eggs.html
www.mysite.com/products/cheese.html
www.mysite.com/products/bread.html
etc.
For each page you have a matching variation page:
www.mysite.com/products/eggs.html?var=bigpicture
www.mysite.com/products/cheese.html?var=bigpicture
www.mysite.com/products/bread.html?var=bigpicture
etc.
You want to use all the product pages in 1 experiment.
Go To google Analytics Content Experiments: For the orginal page choose ONE of the many product pages (e.g. www.mysite.com/products/eggs.html) (This is just to get the experiment code and provide GA with an example page)
For the variation page choose relative url and put ?var=bigpicture
Then place the javascript required for the experiment on ALL the original product pages you want in the experiment
For more information see: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2664470&topic=1745208&ctx=topic