Wish to view the changes that you’ve made to your campaign over its lifetime? Or ever felt the need to roll back the changes to any of the earlier versions of your campaign? All this is possible if a Version History mechanism is in place.
In this article, we’ll learn about Version History in the context of VWO, its advantages, and how you can use Version History in VWO.
A Version History mechanism records changes that you’ve made to your campaign(s) over its lifetime, i.e., you can access all the copies of the changes. It provides a way to look back at previous iterations and enables you to restore an older version.
Advantages of Version History
Some advantages of using Version History are:
- Enables you to audit the history of an item
- Allows to track content changes
- Enables you to restore previous versions
Version History in VWO
Consider you’ve recently made some changes to your campaign; however, they cause some website elements to break or adversely affect your website experience. For this, you plan to roll back to the previous configurations of your campaign.
One way is to do this is by remembering the changes you've made in the past and manually revert to them. Do you think that this is a feasible solution if there are a lot of changes? Of course not.
Another way to do this is by using the Version History feature of VWO. With this, you can quickly review and roll back to an earlier version of your campaign with a single click. You do not have to worry about remembering the changes and manually reverse them; VWO does it for you.
Any time you modify your VWO Testing or Rollouts campaign, a new version is saved in the form of a log. A version is created every time a set of changes are saved using the editor.
In VWO, a Version History shows the following information:
- Date and time when the version was created
- Who created the version
With each saved version, you see a vertical ellipsis icon (⋮), which gives you the following options: name the version, view version changes, and restore version. Along with this, you also have an option to filter the named versions. This can be done using the Show only named versions option.
1. For Enterprise and Pro accounts, you can restore any version from the history of the campaign.
2. Restore in Growth accounts is limited to the last 3 versions only.
Viewing Version History in VWO
To view the Version History of your VWO campaign, perform this:
Procedure
- Login to your VWO account.
- Select the campaign you want to view the history for.
- Go to the editor, and click on the HISTORY option present at the bottom of the page.
The Version History panel appears. You can now choose to work (name, view, and restore a version) with any versions.
Naming a Version
By default, a version is saved with the time and date of creation. However, it is a good practice to give a name to save versions. Say, giving a name in correspondence to why you changed the campaign configurations could help you down the line.
To name a saved version, click on the vertical ellipsis icon (⋮) corresponding to the saved version, and click the Name this version option. If you wish to filter out all the named versions, you can use the Show only named versions option.
Viewing Version Changes
Using the View this version option, you can view the changes made to the particular version of a campaign. We recommend you first view the version changes before restoring it. When viewing a variation, you can switch between the different versions and also restore a version.
To view version changes, click on the vertical ellipsis icon (⋮) corresponding to the saved version, and click View this version option.
Restoring a Version
Using the Restore this variation option, you can preview and restore an older variation. When restored, a new version is created, which will carry the details of which version it was restored from. You can even choose to restore a specific variation(s) of an older version; the other variations are carried over from the currently active versions. If the version has any campaign JS applied, you can choose to restore it also.
You can restore a version with the following two options:
- Click on restore when you are viewing it, or
- Directly restore a version from the sidebar.
Either way, when you restore a version, the details of what you can choose to restore are displayed. You can choose between the different variations, campaign JS, or CSS (if applied).