1. What is Audience?
The Audience step is characteristic to all the types of experiments – A/B testing, Personalization, Overlay or Survey, and using it in an improper manner is one of the most common factors that prevent an experiment from being displayed properly.
Into the Audience section you must insert the URLs of the web pages where you want your experiment to be triggered.
2. Condition types
You can set a condition based on the following statements:
- URL is – with this rule, the A/B test will run only on the exact page introduced in the value field next to the condition
- URL is not – with this rule, the A/B test will run on all the other pages but the one introduced in
the value field next to the condition - URL starts with – with this condition, the A/B test will run on all the pages that have an URL
which starts with the same value as inserted in the value field - URL ends with – with this rule, the A/B test will run on all the pages that have an URL which ends with the
same value as inserted in the value field next to the condition - URL contains – using this condition the A/B test will run on all the pages that contain in their
URL the same value as the one inserted in the value field - URL does not contain – using this condition the A/B test will run on all the pages that do not
contain in their URL the value entered in the value field - URL Regex – using this you can define with RegEx the pages where you want the A/B test to
run - Page contains keyword – with this, the A/B test will run only on the pages that contain the
keyword or keywords in a small sentence/grouped format
Further down, we will explore the most common cases where the misuse of the Audience section causes errors in applying an experiment.
3.1. Case 1
One of the most common mistakes is directly copying the URL from the browser and pasting it into the Audience field when using the URL is condition.
When doing this, most of the time, a “/ ” character will be added at the end of the URL that has been copied into the Audience tab.
It is very important to check if the URL inserted into the Audience tab is identical to the one from the browser.
This is a general example of the way the URL appears into the browser:
And the way that it has been copied into the Audience section:
The “/” character is added when you copy and paste an URL into the audience field and it has to be manually removed (if it is not part of your URL from the browser).
3.2. Case 2
Another case that can also cause errors in applying an experiment is when a user types in, manually, an URL into the Audience section and omits the fact that the actual URL does not contain ‘www’.
In this case, when the condition used is URL is, the link will be considered invalid and the experiment will not be applied.
This is an example of the way the URL appears into the browser:
And the way it has been typed into the Audience section:
If you choose to type your URL manually, pay attention to the structure, as in this case, whether it contains ‘www’ or not.
3.3. Case 3
This case presents the situation when a user enables SSL Certificates for a website. What will happen regarding the URL structure is that http will turn onto https.
In this case, if a user has already created an experiment on the initial version of the website (where the URL structure is set by using http), that specific experiment won’t apply on the website where the SSL was enabled (where the URL structure is set by using https) due to the fact that the URL condition becomes invalid.
This is a general example of the way the URL appears into the browser after SSL Certificate has been enabled:
And the way it has been set into the Audience section before enabling SSL Certificate:
Due to the fact that the URL inserted into the Audience section contains http instead of https, the condition will not be considered to be valid.
A solution for this is to Edit the already created experiment and modify the URL by replacing http with https.
In this case, it is important to also modify the website’s URL that has been introduced into the platform for preventing future errors that may occur.
You can do this by going to Edit website into your Dashboard and make the changes into the corresponding pop-up window:
Click on Edit website in order to update the information regarding your website.
Here you can replace the http form of the website URL with the https form.
3.4. Case 4
This case presents the situation when only a part of the desired traffic is included in the experiment.
Let’s say for example that an active paid campaign exists with the purpose of directing traffic to the home page of a website. In order to be able to track the results of that campaign, specific UTM parameters have been added to the initial URL.
In this case, if the URL condition into the Audience section is set using URL is the traffic that comes from the paid campaign will not be included in the experiment (this happens due to the fact that the condition is set to trigger the experiment only for identical links, which in our case www.example-domain.com is not identical with www.example-domain.com/?utm_source=newsletter…).
A solution for this is to set 2 URL conditions:
- one should be URL is – http://www.example-domain.com – the link should be identical with the one from the browser, pay attention to the cases mentioned above.
- the other one should be URL starts with – http://www.example-domain.com? ( after ‘ ? ‘, the extra parameters are added).
This is a general example of the way the URL with parameters appears into the browser:
And the way the URL condition must be set into the Audience section:
