A/B Testing and Control Group

A/B Testing lets you compare several alternate versions of the same web page simultaneously and see which produces the best outcome. CCE allows you to conduct A/B testing easily by creating an "Evolve" module.

Control Group

A control group is a segment of users who are not exposed to any variables being tested. You can define a control group by selecting Control Group as a test variant:

The users in Control Group will see the control links that are passed to the CCE impression requests. The "control links" are the links found in the `targetElementId` div. For example:

<div id="target_element">
  <div class="item">
    <a class="imageLink" href="https://www.example.com/news/trump-fires-bolton.html"><img src="https://www.example.com/images/trump-fires-bolton-a.jpg"></a>
    <a class="itemTitle" href="https://www.example.com/news/trump-fires-bolton.html">Trump Fires John Bolton</a>
    <a class="fbShareLink" href="https://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fnews%2Ftrump-fires-bolton.html" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.example.com/images/fb-icon.png"></a>
  </div>
  <div class="item">
    <a class="itemTitle" href="https://www.example.com/news/apple-unveils-iphone11.html">Apple unveils new iPhone 11</a>
    <a class="fbShareLink" href="https://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fnews%2Fapple-unveils-iphone11.html" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.example.com/images/fb-icon.png"></a>
  </div>
</div>
 
[...]
cX.CCE.run({
	widgetId: '<widgetId>',
	targetElementId: 'target_element',
    ctrlLinksCss: '.itemTitle, .imageLink'
});

[...]

In the example above, the items found in the `target_element` div are passed to the request and they are sent back to the client for reporting/tracking purpose. Note that duplicates are automatically removed – in the example above, `imageLink` and `itemTitle` point to the same URL but no special care will be needed to remove such duplicates.

Also note the use of optional `ctrlLinksCss` – In case you want to use links in the specific tags only as control links, you specify the tag names/IDs there.. By specifying `ctrlLinksCss`, the links appear in other tags ("fbSharedLink" in the example) are ignored and will not be taken as control links.

Last updated: December 17, 2021