How to launch Magento 2 A/B testing with Google Analytics Content Experiments?

Starting July 1, 2023, Google Analytics has shifted from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). As GA4 supports custom dimensions, metrics, and offline tracking, businesses still on UA need to make this transition to benefit from enhanced tracking capabilities, including Magento 2 A/B testing.

Useful Tip: before starting Magento test, make sure that your website has a good loading speed. Magento 2 A/B testing tools can slow down your store creating an additional burden in loading. To avoid issues with speed loading, we recommend implementing the Google Page Speed Optimizer extension before running a/b tests. This plugin optimizes the HTML code, reduces the number of requests to the server by merging and minifying CSS and JS files, resizes images without losing the quality and allows you to enable the lazy loading.

Steps to Launch A/B Testing in Magento 2 with GA4

Step 1. If GA4 is not set up on your website, follow Google’s setup guidelines, which allow dual tracking for both UA and GA4 (if necessary during the transition).

Step 2. Navigate to Stores > Settings > Configuration > Sales > Google API. Expand the Google Analytics 4 section and set enable to "Yes. Enter your Measurement ID. Enable Content Experiments for A/B testing to support Google Analytics Content Experiments.

Step 3. Set up variants in your Magento 2 store. Create separate pages, products, or categories with unique URLs for each variant within the same store view.

Steps to Launch A/B Testing in Google Analytics 4

Step 1. Go to your GA4 property and select the appropriate Account and Property.

Step 2. Navigate to the Admin section, and either select an existing view or create a new one. To create a view, click Create View in the View column, choose either Website or Mobile app, give it a descriptive name, set the time zone, and click Create View.

Step 3. In the Behavior tab, go to Experiments and click Create experiment. Specify the traffic percentage, add the Original Page URL and the URLs of each variation, and complete the setup options. Once the experiment is set, select Manually Insert the Code and copy the snippet to use in Magento.

Advanced Tips for Google Analytics Content Experiments

• Use Google Tag Manager to implement improved e-commerce for tracking critical customer interactions such as add-to-cart, checkout, and remove-from-cart events.
• Ensure compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. If using Cookie Restriction Mode in Magento, GA4 will only collect data with explicit cookie consent from users.
• Before A/B testing, use performance extensions like Google Page Speed Optimizer to minimize loading delays caused by additional testing scripts.

For more on how to do A/B testing with Google Analytics, refer to Google's developer documentation for detailed guidance.