Each variation in an experience includes the content to serve to visitors that meet the targeting conditions for the campaign. For each targeted experience, you can create one or more variations to test and dynamically optimize your campaigns.
There are three ways to create variations:
- Create a new variation: To create a variation from scratch, select an out-of-the-box template or a custom template built by your developer.
- Import a variation from another experience: Start with an existing variation and then edit the content to your current needs.
- Sync with Data Feed: Create variations using a Data Feed when you have a large number of variations and you want to automate and sync their content by tying them to a data source.
Notes:
- Don't use special characters like % and & in variation names as they might cause unpredictable behavior.
- We support up to 10,000 characters per line of code. Longer lines can prevent variables from working correctly. To avoid performance issues, break long lines into smaller segments.
- Variations within a campaign must have unique names. Different capitalization is not considered unique (for example, “Variation A” and “Variation a” are treated as the same name).
- You can create up to 250 variations per campaign.
Creating a new variation
The first step is to determine which template to use as your starting point. You have several options:
-
No Template: Create your variation from scratch, using custom HTML, CSS, and Javascript. When you click this option, the Dynamic Yield web authoring tool is displayed, with tabs for HTML, CSS, and JS as well as a preview pane.
After you enter your custom code, you can save it for reuse by clicking Save as Template: - Dynamic Yield templates: Out-of-the-box templates that can be used for different types of variations.
- Custom templates: Templates you created and saved in your account (whether during the process of adding new custom code variations or by using the Templates section under Site Settings in the sidebar navigation menu).
Learn more about creating templates.
You can add variables to use dynamic values for strings by highlighting the relevant value and clicking Convert to Variable. For more details, see Creating Templates: Template variables.
Importing an existing variation
Variations from other campaigns in your account can be reused by clicking Copy from Another Experience in the Variations screen. You can then edit and save as a new variation.
Syncing with a data feed
You can use a variation feed to create and edit experiences with multiple variations. This can be helpful if you have an experience with many variations that needs to be updated frequently. For example, a homepage banner with 10 different creatives that are updated daily.
For details, see Syncing Variations Using a Variation Feed.
Managing variations
You can always edit, add, delete, or pause a variation from any one of your experiences in both live and draft campaigns. Click the More Options icon to reveal available options. Layouts that allow multiple variations in a single view, such as sliders and item lists, also include the option to pin variations to the first (leftmost) slot.
Note: Pinning variations is not supported for variations created using Variation feeds.
Note: Some changes can affect A/B tests. When this happens, the system automatically treats this instance as a new test version and begins to calculate its performance measures from the start. Learn more about test versions.