All experiences will begin with filling out the core details of the 'Create' form. These details are the foundations of the test or target itself and include the name, where the test will run, what to track and who will see it - lets get into it!
First things first - accessing the 'Create form'
To begin building out the experience we first need to access the 'Create' form and we can do this from several places. These will take us to the 'Create' form where we will fill in details relating to our project/experience.
Create from the navigation:
Create from the experiences screen:
Step 1 - Project details:
This is where we are defining the top level information relating to the project itself including where it will run and what we will track to measure its success.
Project information
Unsure what 'project means'? Use this guide to understand what a project is, why we use them and the way in which they work.
Project type:
New project - selecting a new project will create a new project entity in the system and will be the default for 90% of experiences you build.
Existing project - choosing an existing project will add this new experience into that project.
Project name - this is the name we want to give to the project itself.
Project alias - this is automated and will populate, pre-fixed with 'ta_' when you enter the project name. The project alias is used in several places to identify which project this experience relates to including any third party integrations such as GA4.
Project description - this will describe your project should anyone else see it. E.g. 'Homepage changes'. This is an optional field.
Environment and location
Want to understand more about locations? Use this guide to understand what we mean by a location and how to create and use them.
This is where we want to run/show our experiences - it may be a single page, a group of pages or even sitewide.
Project environment:
Web page - choose this option to select/create a location relating to an area of the site. E.g. you may have a location for homepage or a location encompassing all product pages.
Server side - choose this option if you are looking to run a server side test and not specific to a location. When choosing this option the project location drop down will be disabled.
Server side testing is set up the same way in the create form however it is fundamentally different to web page. Learn more about server side testing here.
Project location:
Choose the location from the drop down or create a new location using the 'Create new location CTA'.
Existing locations - these may be locations you have set up previously or have used for other projects. There is no limit to how many locations you can create.
Create a new location - creating a new location is easy and more information on how to do so can be found here.
Conversion points
Conversion points relate to what we want to track as part of measuring the performance of our experience. There is no limit to how many conversion points you create as part of building an experience.
As part of onboarding we will create some core conversions for you to use. These will automatically populate in the conversions list and are available for all experiences you run/create.
If you plan to use the visual editor you will be able to create 'Click based' conversions as part of building the experience. E.g. if you want to track clicks on a button such as 'Add to basket' or 'Sign up'.
Creating a conversion point
Creating a conversion point is simple but its important to understand the terminology we use. We have a full guide on creating and testing conversion points here.
If you are using Shopify then collecting conversion points works slightly differently. More information can be found here.
Step 2 - Experience details
Experience details
This information relates to the specific experience we are creating. We are defining the experience type, when it will run and who will see it.
Experience name - this is the name given to this specific experience.
Experience description - this will describe your experience should anyone else see it and it may include more detail relating to the experience than the project name. E.g. 'Homepage sign up CTA test changes'. This is an optional field.
Add labels - you can add labels as an easy way to identify, filter and group together experiences. You can learn more about labels here.
Experience type - this is where we define what type of experience we will be serving/running. Its important to consider some experience types will only work with the advanced editor however a full guide on test types can be found here.
Schedule
This is where we define when we want to experience to run. It can be set live from the moment we decide to put it live or it could follow a specific schedule. We can also decide to end the experience at a specific point in time.
Some of the scheduling options require a tag version of 5.6 or above - find out how to check your tag version and how to upgrade here.
Start date - by default this will be 'From now' however this only takes effect once we put the experience live and means once live it will start serving the experience. You are able to select a date/time in the future so even if you push the experience live it will only start serving from this date and time.
End date - by default this will be 'Run indefinitely' however it will run until we choose to end it manually.
Add additional date and time - we can choose to define specific timeframes we want the experience to run. E.g. if I want to only run this experience on week days I can select multiple timeframes and it may look something like this:
Audiences
This is where we will define who we will show the experience to - experience entry conditions. It may be we want to limit it to only show to mobile users or maybe users who have come from a specific campaign. Audiences can also be related to as 'Segments' and we use segments to define an audience.
More advanced entry conditions can be achieved, such as activating on a button click or scroll, using the advanced code editor and details on how to achieve this can be found here.
You may also consider new or returning users as an audience and more information on how to set this up can be found here.
Audience selection
Select the audience you wish to show the experience to, if you do not have an audience/segment created use the 'Manage audiences' link to set up and create one. More information on creating an audience/segment can be found here.
Variables
Variables allow us to collect extra information in relation to a conversion point. E.g. I want to capture a purchase value as part of someone purchasing or I want to capture an order ID.
Variables require setting up as part of building your test and are only available using the advanced code editor. Info on how to set these up can be found here.
Setting these up correctly is key as it will unlock further reporting options when it comes to analysing your experience.
Create new variable - once you have added the required information to the experience, in the advanced editor, you will need to define what it is called and what format we should expect to see the data come in. E.g. if you add the order value its likely this will be 'Decimal'.
Key KPI
This will be the primary conversion point we use to decide the outcome of the experience we are running. This does NOT impact the experience itself and is only used to show data on the experiences, reporting screen and dashboard. It can be changed at any time. Selecting the drop down will allow you to see a list of your conversion points, created above, and you can select one of those.
Step 3 - Experience configuration
This is where we will define how many variants we will include as part of our experience. The screen will change slightly depending on which experience type we select and each is described below.
Variants
Terminology used:
Name - this is the name you wish to give to that variant. E.g. if you are changing the colour of a button to red you may call it 'CTA Red'.
Throttle - this decides the allocation of traffic to that variant. Be default this is set to auto and will split the traffic evenly across the variants. You can choose to change this and it can be done at any time.
Control - the control is what we consider the standard version of the experience. You are able to change this however in the majority of cases it will remain the first variant.
ABn
When selecting an ABn you will see an option to add variants and there is no limit to how many variants you can add.
Split
Choosing split opens up some new options and these relate to how we want the experience to work.
URL Redirect
We want to push a % of our users to a new page. We will add the new URL under 'URL to redirect to' and we can choose to maintain the original query string parameters/hashes or whether to ignore these.
Query String
We want users to remain on this page however we want to change/update the query string parameters. E.g. we may want to update the query string to reflect this user being part of a particular variant so the QS Key might be 'userType' and you may define the QS value as 'variantB'.
Baseline
For baselines there are no further options here and that is because we are not serving variants. We are only collecting data and therefore we do not need to allocate a name nor traffic to it.
Target
For targets we are not necessarily splitting traffic based on a % allocation. Instead we are defining that we want to show a specific experience to a specific audience. There is no limit to how many variants you add here. You are adding a variant then adding the audience you wish to show that variant to.
The option to select an audience to show this variant to differs from the above audience selection. The audience defined above qualifies the user to be entered into the experience and the audience selected here is then evaluating which variant to show based on what audience has been selected.
E.g. the main audience (added in experience details) may be mobile only. The audience selected as part of the target may be users who are part of a specific campaign. If the user has not met the experience level audience (desktop users) they will not qualify to be evaluated for the variant level audience.
MVT
When selecting MVT you can add factors and these factors relate to what it is you are testing/changing. You can add as many factors as you like however the more factors chosen the more variants will be required.
We can then choose to run the MVT as:
Full factorial - this is where we will show every possible combination to the required amount of users.
Fractional factorial - this is where will show a sub-set of combinations to identify which combination performs best.
You can find out more about what these options mean as well as how we calculate the outcome here.
Choosing an editor type
We now need to choose how we will build out our experiences. We have 2 options here and a full guide on which one to choose can be found here.
Launching either of these options will open a new window either with a code editor (advanced) or to the page selected in the location chosen above.
If no location has been set you will be shown this option:
This is asking which page you want to open to go ahead and build your experience. If you have created a location that consists of multiple pages then this is asking you to choose one of those to make the changes to however when the experience goes live it will serve the experience to any page matching that location.
E.g. We want to make a change to all of our product pages so we create a location which groups them together. In this field I will enter a single product page URL, make my changes and when set live those changes will show on all product pages.
Saving your progress
Once you have built and configured your experiences you will choose to 'Save and return to experiences'. This will take you to the experiences screen and you can then decide on next steps:
Save and continue later - your progress is saved and you can return and amend at any time.
Start QA - you may now begin your QA process prior to pushing this experience live. Find out how to QA and preview your experience here.