What if you want to go beyond single page split testing and test an entirely new website, with new content, sales copy, a different design, the works ?

If you combine the power of Logaholic Web Analytics and a content management system like Wordpress, there is a pretty easy way to pull off this magic trick.

If fact, if you are reading this, you are one of my test subjects and you are looking at the new website I can now run both websites simultaneously and I’m sending 30% of visitors to my new site, and 70% to the old one as a control group.

Using the Logaholic Split Testing system I can track users to each website version and compare the results. Is the new website better at converting more visitors to trial downloads, subscribers and customers ?

You know the old saying ‘Don’t throw away your old shoes before you have new ones’ (is that a saying in your language?) is very true here. By testing your new site before you destroy your old one, you can be sure you are making the right decision and you have the opportunity to fix any problems without too much ‘damage’.

Step by Step Instructions

1. Make a copy your wordpress database

   For your new website, I’ll assume you will use your current site as the starting point. Before we can change the content and settings of the new site, we need to make a copy of the wordpress mysql database, so our original site can stay unchanged.

   There are a number of ways you can make a copy of a mysql database, please read this if you are not sure how to do this. In my case, I could just copy the database folder like so:

   > cp -r /var/lib/mysql/wordpress /var/lib/mysql/wordpress_copy
   > chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql/wordpress_copy

2. Create a Split Test in Logaholic

   Open your Logaholic, go to “Test Center” and click “Create a new PHP split test”. Enter a name and description, something like “Website Split”, “This will split test the entire website”.

   Leave the “Import Test URL” field blank and click “Create”. Next, leave the variation fields completely blank, just click “Create” again.

   Now, click the link to save your test file. The file will be named something like this:

   profilename-splittest10.php

   Once published, this file will set a cookie for your visitors with a value of A or B, so we know if we want send them to website A or website B (the new one).

   The cookie variable will be named like this:

   $lgprofilename10

“profilename” will be replaced with the actual name of your logaholic profile and
“10″ will be replaced with the split test ID number, please keep that in mind.

3. Edit wp-config.php

   Make a backup copy of your wp-config.php file (located in your wordpress directory). Next, open it in your favourite editor. At the top you find a line that looks like this:

   // ** MySQL settings ** //
   define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database

   We are going to replace this with this:

   // ** MySQL settings ** //
   if (@$lgprofilename10!=B) {
   define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the old database
   } else {
   define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress_copy’); // The name of the new database
   }

   This piece of code will load the new database for any user that has a cookie value of “B”, and the old site for anyone else (cookie=A or no cookie at all).

   Save the wp-config.php file and upload it to your server.

   To preview your new site, just open it in your browser and add ?lgprofilename10=B to the url.

4. Build new website

   To build the new site, you’ll have to set the cookie permanently, so you can log into your wordpress administration area using the new database.

   To do this, create a new file called “manualcookie.php” (or whatever you want to call it) and put this code in there:

   <?php
   if ($cookie==”off”) {
   SetCookie(”lgprofilename10″,”",time() + 8640000,”/”,$HTTP_HOST,0);
   } else {
   SetCookie(”lgprofilename10″,”B”,time() + 8640000,”/”,$HTTP_HOST,0);}
   ?>

   Save the file, upload it to your server and open it in your web browser. Now you’ll be the only person in the world that will see site B when you visit your site.

   You can now log into wp-admin and make your new website.

   If you need to see your old site, you can always open a different browser (like firefox) or you can remove the cookie again by opening manualcookie.php?cookie=off

5. Add Split Test Code
   When you are finished creating your new website and ready to start testing, copy the logaholic split test file (profilename-splittest10.php) to your wordpress directory.

   Next, open index.php (the one in your wordpress directory) and add this line to the top of the file:

   include(’./profilename-splittest10.php’);

   Once you save the file, your visitors will automatically get the cookie and be directed to either your old or you new site.

6. Evaluate Results
   Now, some visitors will start seeing your new website. Open your Logaholic, click Test Center and Click the ‘Website Split’ link to view the Split Test result report.

   Use different KPI’s / target files to evaluate how well each site converts to your most important files, the Split test report will tell you which site is the Winner !

7. Go live with confidence
   Once you have your results. Just edit wp-config.php again, so it always loads your winning website database.

Pretty cool right ? Please leave your comments below, thanks!

However, we have also streamlined our product range. We now offer 3 ‘Editions’ of the Logaholic software:

• Logaholic Self Hosted Edition
• Logaholic Windows Desktop Edition
• Logaholic Service Provider Edition

You can compare the available features here.

Each Edition can be purchased with a number of different licenses. Please check out the new products page for details.

The most notable difference concerns the Self Hosted Edition (the old ‘regular’ version). We now also offer a Single Website License. That is now priced at $67. The prices for 5 and Unlimited licenses has been increased.

Again, I hope you enjoy our new website. if you have any comments or suggestions, please leave a comment below, thanks!

Logaholic 2.0.1 is a major update as it uses a completly new database layout. The new database stores information more efficiently resulting in smaller, faster data tables.

As a result Logaholic 2.0.1 is much faster when generating reports for longer periods of time or for sites that have a lot of traffic. It does this without compromising any of the details. You can still drill down to the nitty gritty level and see each and every click on your website.

Logaholic 2.0.1 uses approximately 40% less disk space and can easily be 15 x faster in generating reports. With larger datasets, the increase can be over 100x times faster.

More changes and new stuff:

• Logaholic 2.0.1 introduces some new reports: Screen Resolution, Color Pallette
• Improved test center - it’s now easier split test a small part of a page
• Now has seperated reports for Browsers and Operating Systems in addition to Browser trend reports
• Now supports 1st party Cookie based visitor tracking for both javascript and log file data collection
• Better documentation, lots of bug fixes and many other little improvements

For existing customers:
To update your current Logaholic version, click the “Customer Login” link at the top left of this page.
Next, login and click My Account, View Previous Order. That’s where you’ll find your download link.

For new customers:
You can download a trail version here.
You can purchase a license here.

Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback during the 2.0.1 beta test period!

I hope you enjoy our new version, if you have any comments you want to share, please add them below

You can download the latest version here:
Logaholic 2.0.1

Logaholic 2.0.1 is a major update as it uses a completly new database layout. The new database stores information more efficiently resulting in smaller, faster data tables.

As a result Logaholic 2.0.1 is much faster when generating reports for longer periods of time or for sites that have a lot of traffic. It does this without compromising any of the details. You can still drill down to the nitty gritty level and see each and every click on your website.

Logaholic 2.0.1 uses approximately 40% less disk space and can easily be 15 x faster in generating reports. With larger datasets, the increase can be over 100x times faster.

Since this is our first release using the new database style we would like to invite you to test this version before we depreciate the old version. If you run into any bugs, problems or questions, please let us know!

Click here to download Logaholic 2.0.1 beta

Thanks for your help!

- Ftp log files and error logs are now automatically skipped.
- tar.gz files containing error logs are also handled correctly now.
- Fixed license error when running update.php via the command line (cron job)
- Improved detection of Microsoft search engine crawlers (live.com bots)

Please visit our download page to get a free 14 day trial, or log in to your account to download the latest version.

Logaholic Desktop is the latest addition to our product family, but unlike our server hosted software, this version works on your local PC as a regular Windows program.

There is no need to have a webserver that supports PHP and Mysql, no need to install scripts on your website and no need to set up all kinds of complicated software if you want to use Logaholic like a local Windows application.

Logaholic Desktop includes everything you need in one tidy package. It installs like any other windows program and within a few clicks, you’ll be ready to analyze your websites’ log files.

Logaholic Destop has built-in support for SQLite database files, providing a fast, portable, single-file database format to store your website statistics.

It’s ideal for anyone who can’t or doesn’t want to install Logaholic on a hosted server environment. It is equipped with almost all the features of our server side versions. You can even use the built-in FTP settings to download log files from your webserver quickly and easily.

Logaholic web analytics reveals essential information about your visitors: where they come from, how they find you, what keywords they use and what they do next. It will show you the conversion rates for your products, downloads or subscriptions. It will allow you to dig deep into the numbers behind your website and help you to understand what they mean. But most of all, it will help you make a better, more profitable website.

Powerful web analytics without the installation headaches. Logaholic Desktop is compatible with Microsoft Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

Installing software on your server can sometimes be a daunting task. Although we’ve tried to make the Logaholic installation process as easy as possible, I know there are people out there that can’t get it to work.

In that case, I have some good news for you:

Order your copy of Logaholic today or tomorrow and we will install it on your server for you.

That’s right, buy Logaholic on April 29 or 30th 2008 and we will do the hard part for you, at no extra charge.

Installations will be done on a first come, first serve basis, so make sure you get your order in as soon as possible !

To order, just click the link below and choose your version:
Order Today

One major change is that Logaholic now correctly detects Microsoft’s ‘cloaked’ web crawlers. Yes, Microsoft has done it again. They seem to have unleashed a wierd version of their ‘livebot’ spider a while ago.

I guess it travels slowly because we did not notice it before, but since a few weeks, it’s all over the place. It hits a site from a whole range of IP addresses and does not even identify its self as a crawler, it looks exactly like a regular visitor. However, they all come from one IP range and only if you resolve the ipnumber it’s origin is revealed as ‘livebot-xx.search.live.com’

The previous version of Logaholic will not detect these new livebot requests as crawlers and since they come from potentially hundreds of different ipnumbers, your stats can be seriously inflated and your top keywords report filled with sex and drug related junk keywords, courtesy of microsoft.

We’ve fixed it so it groups all requests from the IP range to a single visitor and classifies it as a crawler so it’s filtered out of things like keyword reports.

Other changes:

- Updated charts files to latest version
- Fixed return visitors bug when we have a lot of crawlers
- Started detecting new livebot based on ip range, merging to one ip
- Filtered out crawler request in search engines report
- Now deleting global settings correctly after delete
- Accurate log file esitmates now work on multiple files
- Actionmenu links to trends now always displays more than 1 day
- Fixed error reporting level
- Added a ‘hide’ feature to disable parts of the software, i.e demo mode (see hide.php)
- Improved handling of long urls and keywords
- Improved report table headings
- Added date selection back in notes system.
- Added last 24 hours to quickdates
- Added loading indicator in funnel reports
- Removed crawlers from funnel stats
- Improved visual mode
- Changed Top Pages reports
- Added most crawled pages report
- Fixed some layout bugs
- Added daterange support in sidepanel links in testcenter
- Silenced argc in update.php
- fixed jumping hr on interface in IE7
- Changed logaholic javascript tracker to work directly with mysql again.
- Changed license system, ioncube is no longer required.

All versions have been updated on our site, so please log in and visit your order page to download the latest version.

If you are not a customer yet, our Free Trial has also been updated to this version. You can get it here.

Thanks for all your feedback!

Michael
PS:
If you want to know more about the Microsoft bots visiting your site, check out these links:

Discussion:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/msn_microsoft_search/3424476.htm

and microsoft’s excuse:
http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2007/12/04/live-search-and-cloaking-detection.aspx

Unfortunately, the new filters were a bit too enthusiastic.

A lot a valid support emails have ended up in the Spam box, which is purged every 3 days.

If you’ve sent us a message in the last 2 weeks and did not receive a reply from us, there is a good chance your email was blocked or deleted by now. In this case, please resubmit your suport ticket here.

The filter settings has been lowered now, so your message should get through again.

Our apologies for any inconvenience.