Cross Domain A/B Testing

How do you AB test a new tagline when you have 800 hotel websites and only a handful of visitors on each site? That was what Michael Giles, CEO of iWannaGo.co Travel Site Network was asking himself when searching for a way to improve his network of travel websites. “We run over 2000 websites that funnel leads for hotels, car rentals and flights to our lead partners, but improving the websites is difficult when you have only a handful of visitors on each site per day” says Michael.

Reedge offered a solution by assisting iWannaGo in its import of thousands of domains in one single project, then dividing them into three main segments: air, hotels and cars. Dennis van der Heijden, CEO of Reedge said: “Using smart segments that search for a handful of common words in domains we were able to quickly group around one thousand domains in one group and when you run an A/B test on a thousand of domains at the same time a handful of visitors on each site can be enough to give statistical significant data.”

iWannaGo.co needed quick answers on header color, taglines, trust elements and their impact on engagement and bounce-rate. That way a new group of hundreds of sites would benefit immediately from these findings. “The first week we A/B tested we already got the first stunning results” according to Michael, “the taglines showed an improvement of more than 25% over the original ones in engagement and a 12% decrease in bounce-rate, we are looking forward to the results of other A/B tests”.

“We prefer to measure actual conversion over engagement and bounce-rate” but in the case of www.iWannaGo.co  the conversion takes place on a third party site to which they currently have no access. Michael’s technical assistant, Sergio is working on this, so in the near future iWannago will be able to place a tracking pixel or script on the thank you page after the conversion on the third party booking site. Michael says, “then we have more data, but at this moment we focus on the part that iWannaGo can control and that is the moment from which the visitor lands on the site till the moment they leave to the booking engine.”