Learn how to run A/B tests in your Marketing campaigns to analyze how different email and ad campaigns affect the browsing behaviour and conversion rates on your website. For example, you could run three different ad campaigns and not only see which campaign gets clicked more often but also which campaigns actually converts better once the visitors are on your website. Or maybe you want to send different newsletters to your users and compare how they affect the browsing behaviour on your website.
In this guide you will learn how to create an experiment and implement it in your marketing email campaign, to let A/B Testing compare your campaigns and detect the better performing and winning variation.
First you need to create an A/B test experiment in Matomo (formerly Piwik): read the A/B testing user guide to learn more.
When you are asked on which target pages the experiment should be activated, we recommend selecting "Visitors enter this experiment on any page".
In most cases, nothing needs to be done as long as the regular Matomo JavaScript Tracking Code is embedded into your website. Learn more about this step in the Embedding the A/B Testing framework.
The generated experiment code (_paq.push(['AbTesting::create', {...) does not need to be embedded into your website.
As marketing campaigns are typically seen by your audience outside of your website (on other websites, in emails, in search engines...), you need to modify the campaign URL that leads your users to your website.
You only need to add two URL parameters: pk_abe and pk_abv which let Matomo know which campaign variation a user got to see.
If your landing page is https://example.org/landingpage, you would include the following URL to link visitors to your website:
https://example.org/landingpage?pk_abe=$theExperimentNameOrId&pk_abv=$variationNameOrId
where:
$theExperimentNameOrId is the name or the ID of the experiment$variationNameOrId is the name or the ID of the variation (use original for the original variation)For example, when the blue variation for experiment buyNowColor was shown, the URL will be:
https://example.org/landingpage?pk_abe=buyNowColor&pk_abv=blue
When the original version for experiment buyNowColor was shown, the URL will be:
https://example.org/landingpage?pk_abe=buyNowColor&pk_abv=original
If you prefer not to have the experiment name in the URL, use the experiment ID and variation ID:
https://example.org/landingpage?pk_abe=5&pk_abv=19
Once you have added the URL parameters, your visitors will automatically enter the experiment when they visit your website via your campaign and you can analyze if any of their behaviour is different depending on the shown variation.
As shown in the example above you can either use the experiment name and variation name or the experiment ID and variation ID in the URL. Using IDs is useful when you do not want to expose the names of your experiments and variations in the URL.
The IDs are also shown in the "Embed code" area when you edit an experiment in the tracking code example.
Measuring the impact of your campaigns using experiments complements the existing built-in Matomo Campaign Tracking.
We recommend creating experiments to measure your marketing campaigns as it will provide you additional value such as:
We recommend tagging your campaign URLs with both the standard Campaign Tracking parameters and your A/B test experiment.
The standard campaign parameters are:
matomo_campaign - The campaign namematomo_kwd - The campaign keyword. This parameter is optional.For example, when the original version for experiment buyNowColor was shown, and you are sending an Email marketing
campaign SummerDeals, the URL you link in your emails will be:
https://example.org/landingpage?pk_abe=buyNowColor&pk_abv=original&matomo_campaign=SummerDeals
When an experiment is finished:
pk_abe and pk_abv from your marketing campaigns.
If visitors still visit your website via one of these URLs, Matomo will simply ignore the two URL parameters and not enter visitors into the experiment anymore.Happy experimenting!