ABingo: An A/B Testing Plugin for Rails

ABingo is an "A/B testing" plugin to use on your Rails applications in order to test differences between two ways of showing the same information. It was developed by Patrick McKenzie, known mainly in the developer community as the creator of Bingo Card Creator.

A/B testing (also known as split testing) is a system of having two versions (or sometimes more) of a Web page and then showing them randomly to visitors, then comparing what visitors to different versions of the page do. This allows you to see if something as simple as a headline change or as complex as a total redesign has an effect on what user's do - such as purchase your product or signup for your service. Once the "best" version has been determined, you can then continue to do further A/B tests until you run out of things to try, thus resulting in a better page.

ABingo adds helpers to Rails to make it easy to implement A/B testing in your views and controllers:

# Simple syntax to start a test
<% ab_test("login_button_test", ["/images/button1.jpg", "/images/button2.jpg"]) do |button_file| %>
<%= img_tag(button_file, :alt => "Login!") %>
<% end %>
# Track any arbitrary event as a conversion
def login
  # Business logic goes here
  bingo!("login_button_test")
end

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