Verifying Changes Made to Your A/B Test Variation on Live Website in VWO

If you wish to verify the implementation of your A/B test variations on the live site, you can use the segmentation option and target the live campaign to yourself. You can do this in the following ways:

Creating a Segment for Your Own IP Address

VWO lets you create a segment for your own IP address to target the live campaign for yourself.

Procedure

1. Login to your VWO account.
2. Go to Testing > A/B.
3. From the A/B test dashboard, select a campaign from the ones previously created.
4. Go to Configuration > URL(s) (for non-Data360 accounts)/ Pages (for Data360 accounts).
5. Click Audience and Traffic and go to Target Audience > Custom Segment section.
6. From the first dropdown, select IP Address.
7. From the second dropdown, select the operator as Is equal to and in the field next to it, enter your IP address.

Creating Segment Using Query Parameters

You can also target a campaign for yourself by creating a segment using any random query parameter and then opening the campaign with this query parameter appended.

For example, if the campaign is running on http://example.com, add abc as the query parameter, IS EQUAL TO as the operator, and the value as 1. Once done, you can view your live variation on http://example.com?abc=1.

Procedure

1. Login to your VWO account.
2. Go to Testing > A/B.
3. From the A/B test dashboard, select a campaign from the ones previously created.
4. Go to Configuration > URL(s) (for non-Data360 accounts)/ Pages (for Data360 accounts).
5. Click Audience and Traffic and go to Target Audience > Custom Segment section.
6. From the first dropdown, select Query Parameter and enter the name in the field next to it.
7. From the second dropdown, select the operator as Is equal to and in the field next to it, enter the value.

Adding Cookie

Another way to target a campaign for yourself is by adding a random cookie and its value in the segmentation. You can create the cookie on the campaign URL using any cookie-related browser plugin and refresh the page. You can use the Edit Cookie Plugin by Google.

Procedure

1. Login to your VWO account.
2. Go to Testing > A/B.
3. From the A/B test dashboard, select a campaign from the ones previously created.
4. Go to Configuration > URL(s) (for non-Data360 accounts)/ Pages (for Data360 accounts).
5. Click Audience and Traffic and go to Target Audience > Custom Segment section.
6. From the first dropdown, select Cookie Value.
7. From the second dropdown, select the operator as Is equal to and in the field next to it, enter the value.

Allocating Traffic Percentage

By default, VWO assigns 50% chances for both control and the variation to appear on the visitor browser. To record visitors per the segment conditions defined above, you must go to the test URL multiple times using Incognito(private) windows. VWO will record the visit as a new visitor every time you refresh the page.

Alternatively, you can test a variation by allocating 100% traffic to it. If required, you can later reallocate this traffic distribution after the testing is complete. This can be done by configuring the Customize traffic allocation for each variation option present in the Settings > Others > Advanced Options section of your A/B test.

To know what variation you became a part of, check the value of variation cookies in your browser. This cookie is called _vis_opt_exp_ID_combi, and it gets created whenever a visitor becomes a part of the campaign. The value of this cookie is 1 for control, 2 for variation 1, 3 for variation 2, and so on. You can check the value of this cookie in your browser after disabling the control. Similarly, you can check for goal conversions by checking for corresponding goal cookies.