Best Practices During a Test
This article will take you through some best practices to keep in mind leading up to launch and while a test is live.
QA'ing your Test (Before and Throughout the Test)
If you've chosen to have the Intelligems team complete your integration, we'll send you a preview video and link prior to going live with your first test. We do our best to make sure the test is working correctly and changing prices consistently according to the test setup. However, we acknowledge that you know your site better than we ever could! Before launching (and shortly after), we recommend doing a thorough sweep through your site to make sure everything is working as expected. Use this checklist to make sure you don't miss anything!
We also recommend doing a sweep through the site at least every few days during the test to ensure nothing has changed that would affect the test (after all, sites change frequently!).
Handling External Areas that Mention Price or Shipping Rates
We recommend thinking through any areas other than on your Shopify site that could create inconsistencies with the test. Where possible, we will do our best to integrate with these external sources, but in certain cases we may recommend removing these instances. Some examples include:
Advertisements: It is often possible to keep test groups consistent with ad prices utilizing traffic selectors during test setup. Please reach out to Intelligems support if you have questions on this!
Google Shopping: Monitor your Google Merchant Center frequently throughout the test. We will do our best to work with you to minimize issues with your Google Shopping Feed. We also recommend turning on automatic price updates in your Google Merchant Center. See here for Google's documentation on this feature.
A few other places to think about: Retargeting Emails, Landing Pages, Affiliate Marketing
Theme Changes
It is generally recommended to avoid major theme changes while a test is live. Examples include:
Major changes to theme code
Changes to text that mentions price or shipping rates (relevant if the test utilizes the find-replace function)
Installing or reconfiguring apps that are close to checkout (for instance cart or upsell apps)
Customer Experience
Pay extra close attention to customer experience issues that arise. While issues are rare, we always recommend keeping your CX team in the loop on tests. Additionally, we recommend equipping the CX team with a code to honor lower prices in the rare occurrence that a customer sees multiple prices (for instance, on multiple devices).
Monitoring Results
While it may take a while to start seeing significant results, we recommend checking the results in the Intelligems analytics dashboard frequently. This will help you end tests early that are materially impacting sales or profit and discover potential issues with the test.
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