MousePotato's Journal: Anyone have a split testing suggestion for php?

Hi folks, today I am doing a 'Ask Slashdot' question of my own. It's been a while since I did any serious web development and things have changed a lot in just a few short years. I have a site that I would like to do some split run testing on the pages that I am serving. The web server is running php on it as well as perl and I could use a mysql database for this if I need to (though as easy as I would like to keep this that seems like a sledghammer on a pushpin...)

The site works like this; a landing page with a few options for the visitor. The selection they make takes them to an appropriate sales letter for the option they have selected and hopefully converts them to a qualified lead/enrollment at my school. I would like to be able to;

1. serve a rotation of sales letters with various headlines and content
2. see which letters are producing the best results
3. keep some very simple statistics of the conversions of the letters so I can tweak them for optimal results

Do any of you have a php or perl script that you would recommend that already does this? Am I using the right terms for this (in advertising/merketing this is called split testing but maybe its called something different on the web???) Any insights would help as I have limited time to work on this project.

I Vote PHP and MySQL

[jeepliberty]

I have more experience in PHP. I'd use php script and add an entry to a MySQL table with an autoincrement field. Then retrieve the number and use modula math to determine which form to use (1-6). Use the autoincrement value as a hidden variable on the form for POST processing.

The POST operation of the form could then populate other fields of the row with user data.

A management summary script could count records, order by report_number descending for namefield not null. (Or something like that).

Re:I Vote PHP and MySQL

[MousePotato]

Thanks for the reply,

I was hoping that I wouldn't have to get to all that and perhaps would run across some type of script that could handle this kind of thing rather than write it. The process you outline is pretty much what I was thinking would have to be done to roll my own.

If I rolled my own I'd probably go overboard on it (as I have a tendancy to do..) it may look a little more like;

1.place/retreive cookie (so if visitor returns they get same page as last time.. or not.. would be neat to toggle that)
2.

Re:I Vote PHP and MySQL

[jeepliberty]

I know what you're saying about it should have been invented already and overdesigning it and under programming it.

In my case, I looked at a lot of online photo album management packages decided to roll my own using PHP and MySQL.

I didn't want to caption any photos, but I wanted an athlete to be able to do a google search on his/her name or school and find galleries on my site.

My homebrew Sports Photo page is here. [icunphotos.com]

Good luck!

I was reading some of your old JE...Did Hurricane Wilma affect you this year?

Re:I Vote PHP and MySQL

[MousePotato]

I like the photo page you put together. I use a freebie called coppermine. For what I need it for its way overkill and when I upgraded it went buggy but it serves its purpose for my needs and qualified under the easy/free and no time involved criteria. You can see it in action here [uskenpokai.com]. I didn't really need the ability to add users and the like but before it borked out on me the people who needed to see the pics enjoyed it. I banned googlebot from the directory as I didn't really want it indexed.

Wilma kicked ou