Testing Pop-Ups

Testing pop-ups lets you measure what your on-site messaging, promotions and lead capture are actually worth, without making permanent code changes. Run a test or a personalization on a pop-up and read the result on conversion rate, email capture, or profit per visitor.

Pop-ups are usually powered by a third-party app (Klaviyo, Justuno, Alia, Privy, Postscript) or built into your Shopify theme. Intelligems works with either, by toggling visibility, editing content, or injecting custom logic for who sees the pop-up.

Looking for the Pop Up / Slide Out offer message that comes with a Merchandising experience? That's a different feature, built into Intelligems and shown on your homepage. See Offer Message.

Which setup to use

Setup	Best for
Content Edits with CSS or JavaScript injection	Showing or hiding a third-party app's pop-up, swapping the content or offer inside an existing pop-up, or changing when it fires
Redirects	Comparing two entirely different pop-up designs built in Shopify or a page builder like Replo or Shogun, or testing two pop-up apps without overlap

Content Edits with CSS or JavaScript injection

Use Intelligems' editor to show, hide, or modify a pop-up on the page.

Example to show the Pop Up:

#my-popup {
    display: block;
}

---

Example to hide the Pop Up:

#my-popup {
    display: none !important;
}

Keep the pop-up in your theme and use Intelligems to show or hide it, rather than injecting the pop-up itself. An injected pop-up has to fight your theme for control of the page and the cart drawer, and that fight is what breaks it.

To change which pop-up displays, either keep several in your theme with all but one hidden by default and use CSS to swap which one is hidden, or use JavaScript to tell your pop-up provider which version to render.

Redirects

Control and each variant point to different Shopify pages or landing pages, each with its own pop-up configuration. Every page has to be self-contained, with its own tracking and its own pop-up triggers.

How to set up a Redirect Experience

Setting up the test

1. Follow the steps to set up a Content Edit experience. Put no pop-up (or your original pop-up) in the control, and your new design, offer, or timing in the variant.

2. Swap the pop-up content in your new group using one of the methods above. This is where you test offers, like 10% off against free shipping.

3. Adjust targeting and triggering. Combine Intelligems audience targeting with your pop-up, for example first-time visitors against returning customers, and change when or how the pop-up fires, on scroll, after a set number of seconds, or on exit intent.

How to Set Up a Content Edit Experience

Use custom events to filter your results

Custom events let you track whether a visitor actually engaged with the pop-up, so you can segment your reporting by people who saw or clicked it against people who didn't.

This matters because it separates the pop-up's effect from the variant group's overall performance. Without it you know the group did better. With it you know the pop-up is why.

Custom Events

Running a pop-up test alongside another experience

If you already have a pop-up test running on a page, a second experience on that same page will muddy both reads. Finish one before starting the other, or scope them to different pages. If they have to run at the same time, make them mutually exclusive so no visitor lands in both. That keeps the reads clean but splits your traffic, so each one takes longer to reach significance.

Mutually Exclusive Experiments

Best practices

• Isolate one variable at a time. Test the offer, the design, or the timing, not all three, or you won't know which one moved the number.

• Connect to downstream KPIs. Go past email sign-ups. Add your COGS in Intelligems and read profit per visitor, so you know the pop-up improved the business and not just the list.

• Check both devices. Pop-ups behave differently on mobile and desktop. QA on both.

Limitations

• Third-party app restrictions. Some pop-up apps don't expose their timing and triggering logic to external scripts. Intelligems can usually control visibility or injection in those cases, but not the app's internal scheduling.

• Theme-level against app-level. A pop-up baked into theme code has to be edited as a content experience. One powered by an app may need its own settings coordinated with your Intelligems targeting.

If you'd like us to look at your setup, reach out to our support team.