Most common way to test optimized or personalized content. In A/B testing, you split your visitors into two or more groups (A, B, and so on) and show different content variations to those groups. When the variations have been seen by enough visitors you can analyze their performance to see which content variation performed the best, for example, resulted in the highest conversion rate or average order value.

In the Frosmo Control Panel, you can create an A/B test modification with two or more variations and define the distribution between the variations.

See also: Variation distribution

The advanced tracking feature extends the basic tracking functionality of the Frosmo Platform with custom events. Custom events allow you to track modifications beyond clicks, displays, and true displays. You implement advanced tracking with a Frosmo Core function in custom code or in modification content. For the function to work, the advanced tracking module must be enabled for the site.

See also: Custom event

Annotations are dated notes associated with a site and shown in timeline-based statistics views. You can add an annotation to a specific calendar date to easily detect whether there has been a change in your site statistics during or after that date.

For example, you can create an annotation for a day you launch a new feature on your site. Later, you can easily view how the launch has affected the traffic, visitor retention, conversions for your site, or the performance of a specific modification.

Average number of conversions completed during a specified period of time by all unique visitors on your site.

See also: Unique visitor

Average order value is, as the name suggests, the total revenue from orders divided by the number of orders. It is an important metric for online businesses to understand their customers' buying habits in order to optimize them.

At Frosmo, average order value is commonly used for measuring the impact of product recommendations, such as the upsell or cross-sell they generate.

Average revenue brought by all unique visitors on your site during a specified period of time.

See also: Unique visitor

Back-end (or server-side) systems consist of databases, data processing components, and other server infrastructures that handle operations not directly visible to website visitors. An important function of the back-end system is to launch programs and operations in response to front-end system requests.

See also: Front end

Use case of a modification, which you select when you create the modification. The case primarily determines the number of variations the modification can have and, if the modification has multiple variations, how the variation distribution is defined.

You can select from the following cases:

• A/B test: Create a modification for comparing two or more variations against each other to determine which one performs the best. You define the variation distribution manually.
• Multi-armed bandit: Create a multi-variation modification that automatically and continuously adjusts the variation distribution based on how well the individual variations perform over time. You define how to measure the performance and select the multi-armed bandit algorithm used by the modification.
• Personalization: Create a single piece of content that you customize for a specific target audience. The modification has one variation, which is pre-created with the modification. You can modify the variation, but you cannot remove it.

See also: A/B test, Modification, Multi-armed bandit, Personalization, Variation distribution

In the Frosmo context, a modification gets a click if the visitor has clicked a part of the modification for which clicks are tracked, such as a button, link, or any element with the class frosmo-click. If the modification has no clickable parts, it cannot get a click. A click is also automatically registered as a true display.

See also: True display

The ratio of clicks to displays or true displays that the modification gets. The Frosmo Platform tracks CTR separately for displays and true displays.

See also: Click, Display, True display

In the Frosmo Platform, a company normally represents a customer account. A company can have multiple sites. Each company has certain settings that affect all sites of that company, such as specific security and modification settings, and which add-ons are enabled for the company.

See also: Site

A Frosmo Control Panel user with the "User" role. Company users are employees of Frosmo's customers, as opposed to Frosmo users, who are Frosmo employees.

See also: Frosmo user

In the Frosmo context, visitors that will see the original content of a web page, not a modification.

The Frosmo Platform automatically creates a comparison group variation for each modification. The platform places 10% of visitors entering the website in the comparison group. These visitors will not see any modifications with an active comparison group variation.

You can deactivate the comparison group variation in the Frosmo Control Panel, if necessary.

Network of global servers connected to each other and used to store and deliver web content, such as images, videos, style sheets, and JavaScript files. When a visitor browses a website, the content of the site is delivered by the CDN server with the fastest access to the visitor's location, decreasing page load time.

The Frosmo Platform uses highly reliable third-party CDNs to deliver the Frosmo JavaScript library and Frosmo-specific media files used on websites.

Content preloading enables loading modification content in the browser as a part of the custom script, which decreases the delay in displaying the modification (the flickering effect).

Content preloading has some limitations, however:

• You can't use most of the advanced modification settings.
• If there are several modifications using content preloading on the same site, loading the custom script will be slower.
• Since the modification is cached in the browser, the risk of the visitors seeing outdated content increases.

You can enable content preloading in the advanced modification settings.

In the Frosmo Platform, a context refers to visitor-specific data stored in the browser's local storage, including:

• User ID
• Segmentation data
• Custom data, if defined

The local storage enables storing visitor data without having to send it to back end. Depending on the website, the Frosmo JavaScript library can use either the site's default, origin-specific local storage or, if the data needs to be shared between multiple origins, a cross-origin local storage implemented using an inline frame (iframe), also known as a shared context.

See also: Local storage, Shared context

Predetermined action you want your website visitors to take, such as purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a brochure, or watching a video. You can define a conversion to be basically any variable in visitor behavior that you want to measure. What exactly you want to define as a conversion depends on your business goals. The most common type of conversion is a transaction, that is, the purchase of one or more products.

See also: Transaction

Conversion information collected from a site in conversion tracking. In the Frosmo Platform, the data for a conversion includes an ID, type, monetary or other value, and description.

See also: Data layer

Visitor action defined as a conversion in Frosmo Control Panel. In the definition settings, you must set a trigger to track conversions. In addition, you can set several options for the definition, such as conversion type and the minimum time interval between conversions.

See also: Conversion tracking

Percentage of all visitors that actually make a conversion. The conversion rate is calculate using the following formula:

(conversions / unique visitors) x 100

The conversion rate is constantly fluctuating due to seasonal changes, marketing campaigns, and sales.

Process of counting conversions on a site to measure how successfully the site is meeting its business goals. Conversion tracking is a prerequisite for conversion rate optimization.

In the Frosmo Platform, and in a more technical sense, conversion tracking is the process of automatically monitoring visitor behavior on a site for actions that qualify as conversions, collecting the associated conversion data, and storing the data in a database, including aggregating the number of conversions of a given type. Conversion tracking is implemented by triggering a conversion event from the site whenever a visitor successfully completes a conversion. A conversion is always attributed to a modification.

In the Frosmo Platform, you can implement conversion tracking with the Frosmo data layer.

See also: Data layer, Transaction tracking

You can set the conversion value as a part of a conversion definition for your site. Normally, the conversion value is the monetary value of the conversion, but you can define it to be any numerical value or leave it undefined. When a visitor completes the conversion, the given value is assigned to it.

If the conversion value is 0 or undefined, the number of conversions is shown in the conversion statistics, but the value of the conversions cannot be calculated.

See also: Conversion definition

Custom events allow you to track modification performance beyond clicks, displays, and true displays, which the platform handles automatically. A custom event can be about anything that you can do with or change in a modification. Custom events are a part of the advanced tracking feature of the Frosmo Platform.

See also: Advanced tracking

A custom extension is an external application you can develop and then add to the Frosmo Control Panel as a new page.

For example, instead of adding product data to a spreadsheet, you can create a form to enter the data directly in the FCP. Or, if your company has multiple sites and you need to regularly synchronize content or configurations between the sites, you can create an application for handling these tasks in the FCP.

In the Frosmo context, custom renderer is a site-specific function to change the default placement functionality or to add new functionality. Custom renderers can be used, for example, to show a modification only when the visitor scrolls the page, or to implement a specific type of click tracking.

The Frosmo custom script contains the configurations for customer-specific modifications to a website. The script also contains the segmentation rules and all other custom code for the site. The script runs on top of the Frosmo Core library and is unique to each site.

The Frosmo Core library and the Frosmo custom script form the Frosmo JavaScript library for a website. To start improving your website UI, you add these scripts to your site.

In the Frosmo context, a modification gets a display if Frosmo Core library has rendered the modification to the page. The display event does not require that the modification has been in the browser viewport and therefore visible to the visitor.

See also: True display

Number of seconds after which the modification is displayed once the Frosmo script has been loaded. The delay timer starts when the modification placement is verified and the modification is ready to be displayed.

You can define the display delay in the advanced modification settings.

Display interval determines how often the same modification can be shown to visitors. You can set the interval to seconds, minutes, hours, or days in the advanced modification settings.

For example, you can define that a visitor cannot see a specific modification more often than once in three hours.

In modification placements, the display method determines how the modification is placed in relation to the target element in the page code. For example, you define the modification content to replace the original content or appear before or after it.

You can define the display delay in the advanced modification settings.

See also: Placement

Document Object Model

In web technology, the Document Object Model (DOM) refers to an application programming interface (API) providing a structure for the contents of an HTML, XHTML, or XML file. The DOM allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of the files.

To render a HTML page, most web browsers use a model resembling the DOM. The nodes of the page are organized in a tree structure, called the "DOM tree". When a web page is loaded, the browser creates a Document Object Model of the page. You can then use JavaScript to modify the HTML, CSS, and events on the page.

Parts of an application or website with which a user directly interacts, namely the graphical user interface (GUI). In UI development, front-end (or client-side) design and operations are implemented mainly by using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

See also: Back end

The Frosmo Control Panel is the user interface you use to access the Frosmo Platform features. When you create and edit segments and modifications in the Control Panel, the changes are reflected in the JavaScript file customized for your website.

The Control Panel also contains a comprehensive set of analytics, so that you can easily view conversion data, segment behavior, and the performance of individual modifications on your site.

Set of components in the Frosmo back end that provides a single, consistent means of sending data to and retrieving data from the back end, and for processing and storing that data.

The Data Pipeline is used, for example, in advanced tracking and when generating recommendations.

Identifier assigned to each new visitor to recognize the visitor on the Frosmo Platform in order to retrieve visitor-related data from the Frosmo back end. There are two types of Frosmo IDs:

• Local Frosmo ID: Used to identity a visitor on a specific site.
• Global Frosmo ID: Used to identify a visitor across domains and sites of a company, if target groups are enabled for the company.

The Frosmo Platform is a web UI development solution for improving website functionality and personalizing online user experience. The main components of the platform are:

• Frosmo JavaScript library, which handles the modifications to the site, manages segmentation, collects usage data, and fetches content to display from the back end. The library includes Frosmo Core library and site-specific custom code.
• Frosmo back end, which stores the usage data collected by the Frosmo JavaScript library and processes the data for reporting and analysis purposes. The back end also stores operational data related to modifications, segments, and other configurable resources.
• Frosmo Control Panel, which manages the Frosmo JavaScript library (and thereby how the site is modified and improved) and pools analytics data from the Frosmo back end.

An FCP user who is a Frosmo employee.

See also: Company user

By definition, a landing page is any web page through which a visitor enters a site, such as the site home page or a campaign page.

However, in online marketing and ecommerce, landing page normally refers to a standalone web page that appears after a visitor clicks a search result or an online ad. The purpose of the page is to encourage the visitor to take a predefined action. The goal of that action can be lead generation (getting the visitor's contact information) or "warming up" the visitor to enter the conversion funnel to make a purchase (for example, presenting product information or a special deal).

Destination page

Lander

Number of visitors currently segmented.

The local cookie total is calculated daily. The calculation starts after midnight local (server) time for the previous 24-hour period. Some visitors may be segmented and then exit the segment during the same day. Therefore, the total number of visitors for a day may be higher than the local cookie total.

Web applications use local storage to store data in the visitor's browser. All pages from the same origin (protocol and domain) can use and access the same data.

The localStorage object stores the data with no expiration date. The data persists when the browser is closed and will be available for the subsequent browsing sessions.

Unlike cookies, local storage does not affect the performance of the website.

See also: Context, Session storage

The multi-armed bandit is a modification case for automatically managing and optimizing variation distribution. Multi-armed bandit modifications continuously adjust their variation distribution based on how well the variations perform over time. This way, the multi-armed bandit automatically shows the best-performing variation most often.

For more information, see Multi-armed bandit optimization.

Negative match is a segment for visitors who do not take a specific action on a website. This is useful when you want to use segmentation to exclude visitors not interested in specific products or services from your target audience.

See also: Segmentation

Exclude segment

Exit rule

The origin of a web page is defined by the protocol (scheme), the domain (host), and the port it uses. For example, in the URL http://company.com/dir/index.html, the protocol is http, domain is company.com, and port is, by default, 80. If two web pages (for example, http://company.com/dir/index.html and http://company.com/dir/page.html) share the same values for these elements, they are considered to have the same origin. The URLs http://company.com/dir/index.html and http://company.com:81/dir/index.html therefore have different origins, as the latter uses port 81. 

Same-origin policy is a security model that prevents a script running on a website from accessing the data on pages with a different origin.

Using shared context (a cross-origin local storage) enables data to be shared between multiple origins.

In the Frosmo context, origin also has another meaning. When you create a site in the Frosmo Control Panel, you must enter the complete URL of the site. This URL determines the site name (that is, its origin) used to identify the site in the site's custom script and in the Frosmo back end.

See also: Domain, Shared context, URL

Perceived performance refers to how fast a visitor thinks your website is regardless of how fast it technically performs.

There are several ways to make your website feel faster, such as adding progress indicators, and using button states and lazy loading.

Making real-time changes to a website based on the attributes and behavior of the visitor. The goal of personalization is to provide a more relevant user experience and, as a result, drive conversion and create revenue. Personalization can also be used to cross-sell or upsell products and create brand loyalty through engagement.

Technically, web personalization is implemented by applying specific changes to the website based on visitor segmentation or other methods of gathering behavior data and triggering events based on it.

In the Frosmo Control Panel, personalization also refers to a modification case for creating a piece content that you can customize for a specific target audience.

See also: Case

A placement determines where on the web page a modification is placed. In the page code, the modification is always placed in relation to a specific target element. How and where the modification is actually displayed on the page depends on the page layout.

You can create and modify placements through Frosmo Control Panel.

Preview URL is the absolute URL of a page where you can preview modifications assigned to a placement.

The Control Panel uses the preview URL for launching variation previews from the modification UI.

If there are several modifications with the same placement settings, priority determines which of the modifications is displayed first.

You can define the priority for a modification in the advanced modification settings.

Product information collected from a site in product tracking. The data for a product typically includes fields such as ID, name, category, description, image, and price. You can use product data to, for example, create product recommendations.

See also: Data layer

Process of automatically collecting product data from a site and storing the data in a database.

In the Frosmo Platform, product tracking is implemented by scraping product data from product pages as they load in a visitor's browser or by reading a product data feed. Product tracking is also used to aggregate the number of views a given product receives.

In the Frosmo Platform, you can implement product tracking with the Frosmo data layer.

See also: Data layer

Part of the URL of a web page that contains search parameters for searching a dynamic website. A query string starts with the "?" character, and consists of a key and value separated by the "=" character. For example, in the URL http://www.example.com/index.html?search=word, the key is search and the value is word.

If there are several query parameters in a query string appended to a URL, they are separated with the "&" character.

In the Frosmo context, you can use query strings when creating segments and triggers.

In the Frosmo Platform, a recommendation is a piece of dynamically generated content predicted to appeal to a visitor and delivered through a modification. The platform generates recommendations using the Frosmo Recommendations system.

Product recommendations, that is, recommendations generated from product and transaction data are the most common category of recommendations. Examples of product recommendations include most viewed products and products purchased together.

A regular expression, or regex, is a string of characters defining a search pattern. Regexes are generally used in string processing in search engines and database queries. The regex syntax varies depending on the programming language being used.

In the Frosmo context, you can use regexes in segmentation when creating or editing segmentation rules with options that support regular expressions (URL, protocol, domain, path, and anchor). You can also use regexes when defining URL rules for placements and triggers.

In the Frosmo context, the sample size calculator is a tool in the Frosmo Control Panel for determining how many subjects are needed for an A/B test to get a result that is statistically significant.

See also: A/B testing

You can use segment groups to

• Categorize segments and thus manage them more easily. For example, you can group similar segments to add them more easily in the audience settings of a modification.
• Make segments mutually exclusive within a segment group. This means that a visitor can only be in one segment within a segment group. For example, you can define segments for visitors in major cities. If a visitor is currently segmented in city A, but gets segmented again in city B, they are automatically excluded from the segment for city A.

Segment groups are site-specific. To segment visitors across sites, use target groups.

See also: Target group

In the Frosmo context, a selector is used to specify a target element in which to place a modification. Selectors use CSS or jQuery syntax.

You can select or create the target elements in placement settings in the Frosmo Control Panel. To use jQuery selectors, your site must have jQuery enabled.

For CSS, the valid selectors depend on the browser versions you want your site to support, and for jQuery, on the jQuery version used on your site.

See also: Target element

Session source is the web page from which the visitor arrives to your site. It can also be direct traffic, which means that the visitor didn't come from another website but, for example, through a bookmark or by typing the URL directly in their browser.

You can define the session source(s) for a modification in the advanced modification settings to determine the visitors to whom the modification is displayed. You can view the session sources for your site in the Frosmo Control Panel statistics. The session source is defined on domain level. You can only define the session source for basic modifications.

See also: Visit referrer

Session storage is used to store data in the visitor's browser for the active tab and the duration of the current browsing session. When the visitor closes the active browser tab or window, the data is removed.

See also: Local storage, Session

Shared context is a cross-origin local storage implemented using an inline frame (iframe). It allows storing visitor data across protocols and domains without having to send it to the back end, which in turn allows the data to be stored only once and the visitor to be treated as a single user within the service.

A common example of the shared context is a site that uses both HTTP and HTTPS to deliver a service. This requires data to be shared between two origins. Using a shared context allows the origins to be treated as one and the same.

You can enable shared context for your site in the Frosmo Control Panel site settings when you create a new site.

See also: Origin

In the Frosmo Platform, a site represents an actual website of a company. Each site has its own custom script that contains the Frosmo-specific configurations and custom code for the website. Each site also has its own dedicated set of data and statistics tracked by the Frosmo Platform on the website.

A site typically corresponds to a single domain or subdomain, such as company.com or shop.company.com, but you can also manage multiple domains and subdomains with just one site. You can create one or more sites for a company.

By default, the Frosmo Platform does not apply same-origin policy (which only allows scripts of the same origin to access data on the site).

See also: Origin

Sizzle is a JavaScript CSS selector engine that supports CSS3 and jQuery selectors as well as other types of selectors and pseudo-selectors. Using Sizzle allows you to select elements on a web page based on their CSS syntax.

You can enable Sizzle for your site in the Frosmo Control Panel company settings.

Custom action that you can use to control whether the modification is shown to a visitor. For example, you can define that the modification is only shown to visitors that are logged in, or visitors using a specific language version of the site.

You can define a state for a modification in the advanced modification settings.

When testing UI modifications, you want to be sure that you get valid results from your tests. Statistical significance calculator is a tool for determining how many visitors you need (at the least) to reach statistical significance in an A/B test. The calculator calculates whether the difference in the values for a particular metric (click-through rate or conversion rate) for different variations is statistically significant.

You can calculate the statistical significance of your tests in the Frosmo Control Panel, modification analytics.

A tag manager is a container for controlling the deployment of all other (mostly third-party) tags through a web interface. When using a tag manager, you place a single JavaScript tag (the tag manager's master tag) on every page of your website, and manage running all other scripts through that master tag.

You can use the Frosmo Platform as a tag manager to control the other JavaScript tags on your site.

A modification is always placed on a web page in relation to a specific target element. The target element can be basically any HTML element or CSS selector. If your site has jQuery enabled, you can also use jQuery selectors.

See also: Selector

A target group combines multiple segments to produce a specified group of visitors for content targeting. Target groups allow for more complex and fine-tuned targeting than individual segments or segment groups. Target groups are company-specific, which means that they are valid across all sites of a given company.

See also: Segment group

A template allows you to define web content once and then reuse that content across multiple modifications on your site.

The content defined in a template can be any combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Template content can also include placeholder elements, which get replaced with specific values in individual modifications that use the template.

When you create a template, you define two key components that together specify how the template works:

• Content. This is the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that make up the template content and define what gets rendered on the page.
• Content options schema. This is a JSON schema that describes the content options for the template.

Test mode allows you to show modifications only to certain visitors for testing purposes. To use test mode, you must enable it for modifications in the Frosmo Control Panel and then activate test mode in the browser.

See also: Workspace

In the Frosmo context, a transaction can mean two things:

• Simultaneous purchase of one or more products
• Conversion event that involves the purchase of one or more products

See also: Conversion

Product purchase information collected from a site in transaction tracking. In the Frosmo Platform, the data for a transaction includes a list of purchased products and optionally a transaction ID and the total purchase value of the transaction. You can use transaction data to, for example, create product recommendations.

See also: Data layer

Process of automatically monitoring visitor behavior on a site for transactions, collecting the associated transaction data, and storing the data in a database.

In the Frosmo Platform, transaction tracking is implemented by scraping the transaction data from the pages the visitor goes through as they carry out the transaction and, once they successfully complete the transaction, triggering a transaction event. A transaction is also registered as a conversion and therefore attributed to a modification.

In the Frosmo Platform, you can implement transaction tracking with the Frosmo data layer.

See also: Conversion tracking, Data layer

A trigger allows you to detect a particular event, such as a click, on a web page and take a predefined action based on that event.

You can use triggers in:

• Conversion definitions to track conversions
• Placements to determine when to display a modification
• Segmentation by defining that a visitor is segmented when their actions fire a specific trigger

A trigger consists of two parts: the evaluation point (the event on the web page that causes the Frosmo Platform to check whether to fire the trigger) and the rule(s) for firing the trigger. You don't have to define any rules if you want the trigger to be fired every time an event takes place.

For example, you can configure a trigger to be fired when the Frosmo script is loaded (= evaluation point) if the current page URL is www.frosmo.com (= rule). Or, you can determine a trigger to be fired every time a visitor click a specific button (= evaluation point, no rules).

In the Frosmo context, a modification gets a true display when it has remained visible and stationary in the browser viewport for at least 3 seconds. In addition, if the modification's width and height are both less than or equal to 300 pixels, the modification must have been fully in the viewport. If the modification's width or height is greater than 300 pixels, at least 75% of the modification must have been in the viewport.

See also: Display

URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, is a reference specifying the location of a web resource and means to access that resource.

The URL of a web page contains several parts, the most important being protocol and domain.

See also: Domain, Path, Query string

In the Frosmo context, variations are different content versions of the same modification. 

The number of variations you can create for a modification depends on the selected modification case:

• A/B test: Create two or more variations to test which variation performs best.
• Multi-armed bandit: Create two or more variations. The selected multi-armed bandit algorithm decides the best-performing variation.
• Personalization: The modification can only have a single variation.

A visitor is assigned to a specific variation until they clean the browser cache, open a new window in incognito mode, or visit the site from another device.

See also: Case

Variation distribution determines the percentage of eligible visitors to whom a specific modification variation is actually shown.

How the variation distribution is defined depends on the selected modification case:

• A/B test: Manually define the variation distribution.
• Multi-armed bandit: The selected multi-armed bandit algorithm decides the best-performing variation and adjusts the variation distribution accordingly.
• Personalization: The modification can only have a single variation and all eligible visitors get that variation.

If the modification has an active comparison group variation, 10% of visitors entering the website will not see the modification.

See also: Case

Visit referrer is the page from which a visitor has arrived from your site. You can segment your visitors based on the referrer of their visit on URL, protocol, domain, or path level. Visitors segmented based on the visit referrer stay in the segment for a predefined period of time (1-365 days).

See also: Session source

User of a website.

See also: Unique visitor

If there are several modifications with the same placement settings and priority, weight determines which of the modifications is displayed most often.

For example, if modification A has a weight of 1 and modification B a weight of 3, modification A is shown 1 / (1 + 3) = 25% of the time and modification B 3 / (1 + 3) = 75% of the time.

You can define the weight of a modification in the advanced modification settings.

An add-on to the Frosmo Platform that allows you to develop and test site features in the Frosmo Control Panel without affecting the live content of your site. You can either duplicate existing features or create new ones in a workspace, and, when you so choose, publish the features to production.

See also: Test mode