Tracking only when coming from A/B tested part

[Christoph Lupprich]

First of all: Thanks a lot for vanity, it's such an easy way to do A/B tests with rails!

I'm not quite sure if this question has already been answered (I couldn't find it via search or just don't know how to formulate it properly). Now, I have the following kind of problem: I want to track signups, my test consists of two different styles of buttons, one larger, colorish, another one small, no color. Everything's working fine so far. The one thing I'm wondering about: there can be multiple sources to the signup (e.g. via a link in a mail, some other part of the website), not necessarily via this A/B tested button.

Does vanity automatically track only the signups which came from this button? I guess no, cause I didn't see any indication that it would. How would you approach this problem? I thought about adding a URL parameter and checking if that one is present when tracking the metric.

[Doug Cole]

Vanity will track all signups, but unless they saw the button they
won't be part of the A/B test and so won't affect the results. There
is still the possibility of seeing the butons (and becoming part of
the A/B test) and then actually getting to the signup via a different
method. But in most cases that will happen equally to both
alternatives and shouldn't affect the final result of the A/B test.
Doug

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[Christoph Lupprich]

Thanks for the answer, Doug!