At VWO, our commitment has always been to empower you with the best tools to optimize your website’s conversion. A core strategy of ours is sampling, chosen because a representative subset of traffic is often sufficient for deriving valuable insights. Although we support 100% data capture, we recognize that for many businesses with high traffic volumes, processing all data is not practical or cost-effective. To address this, we made Dynamic Sampling a standard feature across all our products, allowing users to gain insights from a sample of data.
Dynamic Sampling ensures efficient utilization of your data quota by spreading visitor tracking across the billing month. This aligns with our MTU (Monthly Tracked Users) based plans, which track users rather than sessions. This approach allows for the tracking of complete user journeys, providing a holistic view of behavior and avoiding the fragmented insights often resulting from session-based models.
While Dynamic Sampling effectively provides the data needed to understand user behavior, we recognize that businesses sometimes need more granular control over data collection. In response, we are introducing Flexible Sampling.
Flexible Sampling enhances your ability to control the percentage of visitors being tracked on your web pages. By setting specific rules for different user groups or pages, Flexible Sampling enables targeted data collection, focusing efforts on what’s most critical for gaining business insights.
Here’s what’s new
Flexible Sampling Groups: You can create up to 10 unique sampling groups, defined using specific URLs, user attributes, or a combination of both. For example, on an e-commerce website, you could group all shoe category pages together and apply a specific sampling rule to this group. Alternatively, you could group all mobile phone visitors located in San Francisco. You can also combine these criteria, such as grouping all shoe category pages for visitors from mobile phones in San Francisco. These groups allow for granular data collection and can be adjusted at any time to adapt to changing business needs. The sampling rules are applied when a user visits your website for the first time, determining how their data will be sampled from that point onward.
Within these groups, you can apply Advanced Sampling Rules to customize your data collection:
- 100% Sampled: Capture data from every single visitor within the group, ideal for critical events or high-stakes pages.
- Custom Sampling Rate: Adjust the percentage of visitors tracked within the group to control the amount of data collected.
- Exclude from Sampling: Opt-out certain pages or attributes within the group from data collection to preserve your quota for more strategic areas. For example, you might exclude low-impact informational pages like ‘About Us’ or ‘Contact Us’ to focus resources on high-conversion product pages during a major sales event.
How will this update help you?
Here are some more scenarios of how flexible sampling will help you:
- High-traffic product launch event focus: During a major product launch event, like introducing a new gadget, apply 100% sampling on the specific product launch page to capture every interaction and maximize insights into user behavior and feedback. This data is crucial for immediate post-launch analysis and future improvements.
- Exclusion for non-essential pages: Suppose your website features a high-traffic “Careers” page that consistently attracts visits but isn’t relevant to your current conversion rate optimization studies. By setting this page to “Exclude from Sampling,” you can prevent the dilution of your data pool with non-relevant visitor data, ensuring that your analytics focus remains sharp on areas impacting your business goals.
- Selective engagement during promotions: During significant sales events like Cyber Monday, prioritize comprehensive data collection on key product pages by setting a 100% sampling rate. This ensures user interactions are captured on all of these high-traffic, high-conversion pages. Simultaneously, exclude less critical pages such as the “Company Blog” or “Customer Testimonials” to conserve your data quota. This strategy focuses your analytics on the most impactful pages during peak sales periods, enhancing decision-making and promotional effectiveness.
Excited and want to know more?
This enhanced flexibility in sampling is now available and ready for you to use for pro and enterprise plans of VWO Insights – Web.
For further details on setting up and utilizing the Flexible Sampling feature, visit our knowledge base article or contact our support team at support@vwo.com.
