Link directly to a variant design

  • 16 August 2011
  • 11 replies
  • 142 views

Although technically a hack way of doing it, it could still be functional and practical.

For example say I’m sending 1 email campaign, which contains 2 products. Instead of linking through to 2 different landing pages, it would be great to send one product link to Variant A and the second product link to Variant B with the content of each changed.

The link could be something like:

unbouncepages.com/landing-page-name/Variant-A

unbouncepages.com/landing-page-name/Variant-B


11 replies

Hi Oliver - To some degree, this is something you can already do

For it to work, you just need to make sure that you have assigned some weight to each of your variants and that your page is published. You can directly link to a variant by appending ‘variant-letter’.html after the path of your page.

For example:
unbouncepages.com/landing-page-name/a.html
unbouncepages.com/landing-page-name/b.html etc.

However, there are some important points I should mention:

  1. If you choose to direct your traffic this way, you won’t register any visitor or conversion statistics (which sort of negates a lot of the functionality you are probably hoping for.) Your visitors need to be sent to the regular URL for their data to show up. Likewise, since this is more of workaround than a supported feature, we may wind up having to change it in the future and the links may not work indefinitely.

  2. Normally, the kind of traffic flow you mention would be handled by directing visitors to two separate pages (rather than two variants within a page which are typically for A/B testing). Is there a particular reason you wanted to send traffic to two variants rather than two pages?

You can also send me a message to support@unbounce.com and I might be able to point you in the right direction.

All the best,
Ryan

Sweet! I’ve been wondering how to do my triple check that each variant is correct without affecting the stats.

Thanks for the quick reply, it’s good to know it’s possible even with the important points mentioned.

The main reason why I’d rather do 2 variants instead of a new page, is because of how long my list of landing pages will get if I did a new page each time and secondly being able to duplicate a variant makes it easier to keep the design consistant between each of the pages.

The solution to the long list of landing pages, would be the ability to put landing pages into a folders i.e. a folder for each of our clients. I think this is something already in the development pipeline based on the post I read yesterday.

Thanks again

Hey Oliver - That makes sense

To address your first point, I’m happy to let you know that we’ll be rolling out page grouping very soon (within weeks as opposed to months)! This will allow you to group pages into folders exactly as you mentioned and should address your page management issue.

As far as duplicating variants within a page for the sake of keeping the design consistent, you can actually duplicate a page quite easily as well. From the dashboard, just click the little gear to the right of the page name and choose ‘duplicate page’. This allows you to use an existing design as a template of sorts for future pages.

Otherwise, we’ll be sure to let you know when we deploy page grouping.

The reason that I would like to be able to link directly to a variant is because I have banner ads that are rotating that drive traffic to my unbounce landing page…the variant of the landing page needs to match the rotatiion of the banner ad.

Hi Tim - in this case then you would want to link to a separate landing page since variants are specifically for A/B split testing. If you don’t need the A/B testing functionality then separate pages is the way to go.

So what’s the status of this - is there any other way to handle this? As far as I can see variant names can still be used as a distinction in a URL and Unbounce records all the visits in statistics. 

To explain - I’m using Unbounce pages along with our regular welcome page as a variants of a first page of our main marketing site (I’m using VWO for A/B testing). Up until now I served 25% traffic to our regular landing page and 75% to Unbounce where it was further divided into 3 variants. Since VWO thinks there are just 2 variants Heat Maps are not working correctly so I’d rather point them to each and separate page.

yes, status? grouping is not done as I see

http://blog.crazyegg.com/crazy-egg-plus-unbounce/

^Shows how to use Heatmaps for each variant.

Hope that helps one element of your issue 🙂

Best of luck,

Joe

@Ryan would you be able to comment on how we now do this?
I would like test each variant for the follow up that happens, which means submitting the form on each variant (although looks the same, I have a different funnel behind each form, so they are different forms) - t hat is the A/B test I am doing.
How do I see the variant pages in “live” to test this? The /a /b or /a.html /b.html doesn’t work anymore (used to )
Thanks

For some reason when I try to force the variants this way I can only get to my A version. The other vatiant (D) will not show up this way. I have the traffic split 50/50 so I’m not sure why this is happening? 

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