How to hold a variable constant for an A/B test
-
For example, let's say you want to A/B test a title tag change. You are hoping to identify whether a title tag change increases CTR. But, position is always fluctuating a bit and that affects CTR, too. So, I'm interested in how you could hold position constant in order to isolate the change in CTR that is due to the title tag change. Does anyone know of resources/tools/tutorials for how to do this?
It's been... a very long time since I took statistics (-: I have access to Excel, MS Access, and R studio.
-
Thanks for the reply. I'll check out the links you included.
I thought it might be helpful to show an example of what got me thinking along these lines. This is a study about A/B testing of title tag changes. They don't say they accounted for position fluctuation; maybe they didn't, but it seems like you'd have to in order to have meaningful results.
-
I don't see a way of doing this accurately. With organic rank fluctuations, seasonality, competition it's near impossible to "hold" a position. However, if you have a position in serps for a specific keyword with little fluctuation and get decent traffic you can establish this as your baseline. Once the title is updated and appears in the serps, begin monitoring w/search console, analytics or etc. and see if you see any decent jumps. Some links for additional information: Finding the ROI of Title tag changes using Google's CausalImpact R package, SEO Split Testing & A Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing: Effective SEO Landing Pages. Would love to hear if anyone else has a better way.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Changing Permalink/ Structure to introduce woo commerce
Advise needed please We have rankings coming along nicely with a website that uses page content but we now need to start online shopping with woo commerce The url structure has always been a bit of a mess, but its quite in depth We are looking to move small paragraphs about each product cat (formerly put on Pages) information into the Product Category and then the Product information into the product page and redirect the old urls to the new urls. It would mean updating the permalinks also - My concern if there is less leverage with product categories - do these rank just as well as pages, are we going to see our rankings change dramatically in doing so? Added to that - is it best doing this change gradually or all at once (like staging site to get the set up ready) and then pushing live
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KellyDSD860 -
Disallow: /jobs/? is this stopping the SERPs from indexing job posts
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesHancocks1
I was wondering what this would be used for as it's in the Robots.exe of a recruitment agency website that posts jobs. Should it be removed? Disallow: /jobs/?
Disallow: /jobs/page/*/ Thanks in advance.
James0 -
Glossary/Terms Page - What is the best way?
We have a glossary section on our website with hundreds of terms. At the moment we have it split into letters, e.g. there one page with all the terms starting with A, another for B etc.. I am conscious that this is not the best way to do things as not all of these pages are being indexed, and the traffic we get to these pages is very low. Any suggestions on what would be the best way to improve this? The 2 ideas I have at the moment are Have every term on a separate page, but ensuring there is enough copy for that term Leave as is, but have the URL change once a user scrolls down the page. E.g. the first page would be www.website.com/glossary/a/term-1 then once the user scrolls past this terms and onto the next one the URL would change to www.website.com/glossary/a/term-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Need some help/input about my Joomla sitemap created by XMap
Here is my current sitemap for my site http://www.yakangler.com/index.php?option=com_xmap&view=xml&tmpl=component&id=1 I have some questions about it's current settings. I have a component called JReviews that xmap produces a separate link for each category. ex: http://www.yakangler.com/fishing-kayak-review/265-2013-hobie-mirage-adventure-island 2014-09-03T20:46:25Z monthly 0.4 http://www.yakangler.com/fishing-kayak-review/266-2012-wilderness-systems-tarpon-140 2014-06-03T15:49:00Z monthly 0.4
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mr_w
http://www.yakangler.com/fishing-kayak-review/343-wilderness-systems-tarpon-120-ultralite 2013-11-25T06:39:05Z monthly 0.4 Where as my other articles are only linked by the content category. ex: http://www.yakangler.com/news monthly 0.4
http://www.yakangler.com/tournaments monthly 0.4
http://www.yakangler.com/kayak-events monthly 0.4
http://www.yakangler.com/spotlight monthly 0.4 Which option is better?0 -
Custom Google Search & Joomla/Wordpress
If you install google custom search on a site - does it record a list of all the searches people type into the search box? Is there a Joomla & Wordpress Search plugin/extension that keeps a track of the search history used on your site(s).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Page not showing up on Bing/Yahoo
We have a page that's ranking well on Google, however the page is not showing up in either Yahoo or Bing. What's even more odd is that for Y! and Bing, the page doesn't return in SERP even when you explicitly search for it (e.g. homepage + name of page). Instead, the result that gets returned is our homepage along with a Page Title that's been manipulated to include the keywords, but the title is not what we have in our title tag. Bing processed our sitemap today and I also manually submitted the URL, but it's still not turning up. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoeLin0 -
XML Sitemaps for Message Boards / Forums - Best Practices?
I'm working with a message board that has been around for 10+ years and never taken SEO best practices into consideration. They recently started seeing mobile URLs show up in regular results, which they don't want. I'm recommending they implement multiple sitemaps to properly indicate to Google how to crawl the site and what to index. I've never dealt with a site this large so I'm not sure best practices. They have a HUGE community and new URLs are created every second. Doing a site: search returns "About 12,100,000" URLs. What are some best practices / the best way to approach sitemaps for a site of this size?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Internal Search / Faceted Navigation
Hi there, I'm working on an e-learning site with the following content pages: main page, category pages, course pages, author pages, tag pages. We will also have an internal search for users to search by keyword for courses & authors & categories. Is it still recommend to "noindex, follow" and disallow in robots.txt internal search results? Or for a site like this, is it better to use faceted navigation? It seems that faceted navigation is mostly for e-commerce sites. What is the latest thinking on SEO best practices for internal search result pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0