It is essential to preview the variations you created in A/B testing experiment. For this purpose, Freshmarketer provides you Preview option which helps you in

• Previewing visual changes made to the variations
• Ensuring the clicks and goals are captured correctly
• Viewing matched and unmatched audience segment
• Previewing the variation as a different visitor
• Viewing variations in mobile and other browsers

The Preview variation option is present in the Summary tab under Variations section, where a list of variations made for the page along with the original is present.

Each of them has a Preview option to the right of it which when clicked opens in a new tab with the overlay of Preview editor.

The Preview editor has 5 tabs:

• Summary
• Events
• Audiences
• View yourself as
• View in mobile/browser

Summary:

By default, the Preview editor opens with the summary tab which contains experiment details such as

A) Experiment URL - provides you the url in which the experiment is running.

B) Traffic recorded - shows the percentage of traffic included for this variation.

C) Heatmap Enabled - shows whether the heatmap is enabled for the variation.

D) URL Matches Pattern - checks whether the match pattern is simple, exact or regex and displays it in the summary tab.

E) Pattern Matched - If the URL Matches Pattern matches the Experiment URL, it displays “true”. If not, then it displays “false”.

For example, if the URL Matches Pattern is regex and has “http://example.com/.*” as the pattern, then the Pattern matched shows “true” if the Experiment URL has any url beginning with “http://example.com/”.

This Tab also contains a drop-down list option to preview other variations (if any).

Events

The Events tab lets preview all the events and goals that are fired for a variation.

For example, if a track click on elements goal is set on a button and if a click is made on that button, then the event details appear under this tab.

With this, you can ensure that your goals, clicks, etc., are captured and accounted as you expected.

Audiences

Next, the Audiences tab lists out the custom targeting attributes and divides them into matched and unmatched segments.

For example, if a custom audience is created with os as mac and mobile device as android. When you open this particular variation in a macbook, then os:mac is listed under matched segment while the mobiledevice:android is listed under unmatched segment.

View Yourself as

In the view yourself as tab, you can check whether the variation is applied for a specific visitor segment. This tab lets you preview an experiment's targeting attributes to ensure that they work as expected.

Click on Add Visitor Attribute and select from the list of options which you want to apply to the variation. Then click on Apply & Reload to view the variation from the perspective of applied visitor segment.

Once you apply and reload after adding the visitor attribute, the change will be reflected in the audience tab too, thus giving you the exact insight about the audience segment.

In the screenshot given below, the visitor attribute Operating System is given as Windows. After clicking Apply & Reload, when you navigate to audiences tab, the “os:mac” segment will be listed under unmatched segment, even though you view the variation from a macbook.

View in Mobile/Browser

The view in mobile/browser tab has two blocks. They are
Preview Link
QR code

Preview Link provides you the link that you can copy and paste on other browser if you want to test it in different environment.

QR Code provides you with the ease of previewing variation in mobile devices. You can do it by scanning the QR code by using QR code scanner app in your mobile.

In the top right, there are icons for minimizing the Preview editor and also for closing it.

Thus, with the help of Preview variation option, you can preview, check and make sure everything you did to the variations works as expected.