A/B Test: Getting Complicated
A merchant wants to simultaneously test changes to the order of four recommended products and the background image for a home page slot. There is a limited time to perform the test and can't run the tests one after the other.
The merchant does the following on the Staging instance:
- Selects site > Merchant Tools > Online Marketing > A/B Tests, and creates an A/B test called recommended-products.
- Enables the test and enters an optional description that is for usage in the testing.
- Includes an email address to be notified when there are statistically significant results for the key metric.
- Selects Adds to Baskets as the key metric.
- Configures the test to:
- Expire along with sessions.
- Run for 1 week.
- Be available for the Everyone customer group.
- Creates four segments plus a control group and allocates 20% of the participants to each.
- Selects site > Merchant Tools > Online Marketing >
Content Slots and opens the global content slot, home-right. They then create four
slot configurations, one for each order of recommended products and background image.
ID Content Type Content Template bgImage-1 Content Asset Image-1 slots/product/verticalcarousel.isml bgImage-2 Content Asset Image-1 slots/product/verticalcarousel.isml Product-1 Product product1, product2, product3, product4 slots/product/verticalcarousel.isml Product-2 Product product1, product2, product3, product4 slots/product/verticalcarousel.isml - Returns to the test and assigns the corresponding slot configurations to the test
segments. Each segment has the image applying first and the product order second, as follows:
Segment ID Content Asset Slot Product Slot recommended-products-1 bgImage-1 Product-1 recommended-products-2 bgImage-1 Product-2 recommended-products-3 bgImage-2 Product-1 recommended-products-4 bgImage-2 Product-2
The test is replicated to production and runs for the week. These are the results:
- One recommended order of products leads to more Adds to Baskets than the other.
- One background image leads to more Adds to Baskets than the other.
The combination of the better product order and background image shows a statistically significant difference in Adds to Baskets over the other combinations. Thus, the winning combination is used for an upcoming change to the homepage slot content.