Setting Up Experiments

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This article helps you understand:

Importance of identifying your Primary Goal
How to identify your hypothesis or intended outcome
Whether you should run a Web Experience or Interactive Experience

Test, learn, repeat. Our customers know that's the key to running Experiments in Sitecore CDP. It's about starting small, making an incremental change, testing it, and if successful, putting that experiment in production.

Like anything, you first want to identify what you're trying to achieve and then work backwards. Are you trying to increase average order value or get more users to join your loyalty program? This is identifying your Primary Goal. Sitecore CDP uses the metrics of the Primary Goal to measure Variant performance when determining a leading or winning Variant. You won't need to add the Primary Goal until just before you start your test, but you should be keeping it in mind as you create your experiment.

Then narrow it down further by identifying something to test and the intended outcome.

Is it increasing more clicks on a Subscribe button by a certain number? Is it increasing average order value by a certain percentage? The intended outcome is your hypothesis which you should capture, just as you would in any scientific experiment.

So, what type of Experiment do you want to run? Is it testing a website element like a button color, or is it testing a website element that's handled by the backend, like using an inventory system to show low stock?

Do you want to test website elements?

Testing a website element is a great place to start if you're new to testing or the Sitecore CDP. You're essentially free to test anything that you want on a page, or across your organization's entire website. This might be the design layout, images (wow-factor, placement, number, and style), headlines, new company branding, text (content, style, font, size and placement), Call-to-action (CTA) buttons (changing the text on the button, varying the size, color and page placement), or any other element that runs on a web-based app.

You should follow the Create a Web Experiment to learn more.

Do you want to test website elements that are handled by the back end?

If you're more familiar with either testing or the Sitecore CDP, you might want to test a website element that's handled by a backend system. You can pretty much test anything across your full technology stack like product discount models, pricing models, risk models, inventory systems, shipping times, manufacturing estimates, etc.

You should follow the Create an Interactive Experiment to learn more.

Then you add your Primary Goal and set the test live.

Later, when you want to test another change, you can add another Variant to the Experiment. In the industry, this is often called Champion vs Challenger. The Champion being the Variant that's in production and the Challenger being the Variant whom you're testing to displace what's in production.