Problem Statement
I disabled a non-performing variation from my campaign. However, some users are still able to view the disabled variation.
Resolution Steps
- For visitors who become part of a campaign, VWO creates a cookie in their browsers which stores information of the variation shown to them. The cookie that stores this information is _vis_opt_exp_EXPERIMENT_ID_combi, where EXPERIMENT_ID is the campaign ID and the value of the cookie is stored as 1 for Control, 2 for Variation, and so on. To learn more about cookies stored by VWO, click here.
For Example, If a visitor accesses Variation 2 in the campaign, the cookie values are stored as 3. Now, if the variation is disabled in the campaign, visitors who landed on the page while the variation was active continue to see the variation. This is to ensure that the visitors have a consistent user experience and they don’t end up seeing something totally different from what they saw earlier.
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As a best practice, if you want to disable a variation from an existing campaign, first, clone the campaign and then remove/disable the variation from the cloned campaign. The reason is simple. For every new campaign, VWO creates fresh cookies and ensures that your visitors are not forced to view the disabled variation.
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If you disable Control in a test where async code is deployed, your visitors may see the control if the page loading times out. VWO code has the timer set for the pages to retrieve relevant settings and libraries. If the settings and libraries fail to load within the set time, the code stops execution and the control version (original version) is displayed instead as explained in this article.