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Conduct Web experiments using PHP, Part 1

By Paul Meagher
2005-03-16

Goal decomposition
Your goal is to conduct a Web offer effectiveness study in which you factorially manipulate a TEXT aspect and an IMAGE aspect, then record whether visitors respond or not.

To implement the software to conduct this quality-control experiment, you need to consider whether your goal can be decomposed into smaller goals that might be addressed by separate software packages. My prototyping research suggests that the following decomposition is viable in this project:

• A stimulus-response package (aka the SR Package) is required to generate the stimulus codes for the experiment, randomly assign the stimulus codes to new visitors, and log whether or not a site visitor responded to the offer. A stimulus code is simply a factor-level combination such as product-short which is used to control which stimulus is presented to the site visitor (that is, the ad banner version consisting of an image of the product accompanied by short sell text).

• A visitor-logging package (the VLOG Package) is required to track visitors across sessions.




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First published by IBM developerWorks
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