Have you ever encountered a situation wherein you had to apply the same set of changes to an element present across your website? For example, applying changes to the newly added "Try & Buy" button present across your website to assess its performance.
If yes, VWO has you covered with its default implementation, which applies the changes made on the default URL page to all of your campaign pages, as long as the modified element is present on the page. As a result, whenever a visitor lands on your test page(s) and sees the modified element, it appears as per the recently defined style. To know more about how modified elements are identified to apply changes, refer to Working with Element's Selector Paths While Making Changes Using VWO's Visual Editor.
Often in your sitewide test campaigns, you might encounter situations where the change you intend to apply is meant only for specific pages and not all the campaign pages together. For example, if you wish to assess the impact of embedding videos for the different categories of products present across your website. Each category will have its corresponding video to be shown, which is not meant to be common across categories.
This is where the new Applicability of modifications settings of VWO Editor will help you gain more control over where the changes are applied. You can access this setting from the Editor Settings > Applicability of modifications section of the VWO Editor. In the scenario mentioned above, you must choose Only the current page setting.
The Applicability of modifications feature in VWO comes with the following two configurations:
- All campaign pages
Choose this setting if you wish to apply changes to all the pages included in your campaign, i.e., if your campaign includes three pages, the change will get applied to all three, provided the CSS selector path of the changed element is the same across all these pages. For example, if you apply a change to the “Try it” button on page A of your campaign and choose this setting, the same will be applied to all other campaign pages.
- Only the current page
Choose this setting if you wish to apply changes to some specific pages of your campaign, i.e., if your campaign includes three pages, the change on page one will get applied to page one only, and so on. This way, you can navigate to individual product pages within the Editor and define changes on each of them.
The Only the current page configuration comes with an additional setting Match URL Query Parameters, enabling you to apply changes to a specific URL. The specified changes will only be applied to the pages for visitors who carry the same parameters. This allows you to define different experiences for visitors entering the page with a predefined URL condition.
For example, assume you're an e-commerce website and would like to promote a specific product (say, a shoe) only for a 24-hour window by announcing a special price for it. The product's search query is appended to URL and may look something like “<URL>?search=promotional+shoe”.
To cater to such scenarios, you can use the Match URL Query Parameters option. The campaign will then look for the parameter condition, and if matched, appropriate information is shown (in our case, it could be an announcement banner with a 24-hour timer). This typically helps in setting up unique messages based on query parameters.
How to Configure the Applicability Setting in the Visual Editor
To enable the desired applicability setting in VWO, follow this:
Procedure
- Login to your VWO account.
- From the panel on the left, go to TESTING > A/B.
- To create a new test campaign, click +CREATE.
- In the Enter URL of the page you want to test field, enter the URL of the webpage you want to test.
NOTE: To include or exclude URLs from the campaign, click the ADVANCED tab present next to the URL field. Using this tab, you can also define advanced pattern-matching options to either include a broad URL with wildcard entries or a specific URL. To learn about using different URL patterns, refer to Using URL Patterns in VWO. - In the Enter URL of the page for which you want to preview field, enter the URL you want to define changes to and preview. The specified URL opens in the Editor.
Assume you wish to run a site-wide test on https://example.com to assess the performance of a newly styled sign-up button (that is present across different pages on https://example.com). In that case, you can define campaign pages with a pattern match as https://example.com*, and select any page for the default URL, as long as the button is present on the page, say example.com/home. When this page opens in the Editor, you can define the required changes on the button. - In the Editor, choose the desired applicability setting from the SETTINGS > Applicability of modifications section. To learn how you can apply changes using Editor, refer to How to Use Editor to Create Variations.