Best Practices for Creating an A/B Test in VWO

VWO is a tried and tested tool that delivers the best possible website experience to your website visitors. However, there are a few best practices that will help you achieve optimal performance from VWO. Taking care of a few important things at every stage during test creation will help you get the most out of your website testing plans.

Things to Consider While Adding Test URLs

• By default, the Simple mode is selected for the URL field. Here, you must only add the exact URL match. If you require to run the test on multiple pages, select the Advanced mode, and add the URL pattern or a regex.
  
  
• In the Advanced mode, you can select different URL types to add patterns, regex, keywords, or match cases to run a test across multiple URLs. Here, you also have the option to include or exclude specific URLs in your campaign.
  
  NOTE: If the URL is accessible on both the HTTP and HTTPS, you must include both the URLs in the campaign. Say, if your domain is example.com and is accessible via HTTP and HTTPS, you must include these using the pattern http*://www.example.com. To know more about different URL patterns, refer to Using URL patterns in VWO.
  
  
• In the Enter URL of the page, you want to preview field, enter a default campaign URL which must be an exact URL. This is the page that loads as the initial URL in the editor, heatmaps, and previews. 
  
  NOTE: If you add a pattern or regex in this field, neither the page loads in the editor nor the previews open.
  

Things to Consider While Creating Test Variations Using VWO Editor

• Do not use the Edit HTML operation for dynamic elements. For example, if you try using the editor to change the dynamic pricing of items added to the cart, the price will appear static in the variations created.
• Do not use the Move or Resize operation on responsive websites as it may hamper their responsiveness. Instead, we recommend using Rearrange. You can add media queries or custom JS code to apply changes for different devices of various dimensions, widths, and heights.
• If the elements on your web page load with a delay, we recommend configuring SPA/SSR Editor settings.
• Do not make changes to the variation while the campaign is running, as this might affect the data which has already been collected for your test. To make the changes in the variation, it is recommended to clone the campaign first and rerun it.
• Preview all your test pages after making any changes. You can keep the Previews tab open in a new tab or window to view the changes in real time. This ensures that your test variations don’t appear broken when making multiple changes on dependent elements.
  
  To learn more about VWO Editor’s Best Practices, refer to Best Practices for Using VWO Editor.

Things to Consider While Configuring Goals for Your Test

To learn about the different types of goals you can use during your VWO test, refer to Different Types of Goals in VWO. When adding goals, consider the following:

• Do not change the existing primary goal as it can disrupt the collected data.
• When you set the goal URL to the same as the test page URL, you'll observe a conversion on page refresh, i.e.,  VWO will report a conversion as soon as a visitor accesses the Goal URL. This is because VWO looks for the page visit cookie. Such reports are meaningless and do not serve your test's real purpose.
• It would be best if you track goal conversions on all existing variations. If you set up a goal for only one variation, you can no longer study or compare data between variations to derive better insights from the test.
  
  For example, consider that you are A/B testing a button with the intent of tracking clicks on that button. In variation-1, you change the text of this button; in variation-2, you change the colour, while in variation-3, you delete the button. This way, you will be able to compare them in a better way.
• Use live previews to verify if the goals are working fine. To learn how to preview goals, click How to Verify Test Goals Setup Using Live Previews.
• If you want to track goals on a page that is neither a campaign URL nor a goal URL, you must set up a dummy Track Page Visit goal for the URL to allow VWO to send the test settings to the page.
  
  For example, say your campaign is running on http://abc.com, and a link needs to be tracked; however, the link is present on the http://abc.com/test.html page. A Track Page Visit goal needs to be created first for the http://abc.com/test.html URL to receive the campaign settings and then start the goal tracking process.