1. Why does the original version load very briefly before the variation?
This "flicker" happens if you have installed the asynchronous code snippet on your page. To avoid this, install the synchronous code snippet on your page. Doing so might have a negligible effect on the page's load time.
2. How does deleting a variation while the test is running affect its results?
Deleting a variation won't affect the test's overall result. However, you won't be able to delete a variation while the test is running. You can only do so after you pause the test. Once you delete a variation and relaunch the test, all of that variation's data will be deleted from the reports.
3. Can A/B testing penalize my organic search ranking (SEO)?
No, A/B tests have no impact on your site’s search engine rankings. The source code of your page isn't changed when editing with our visual editor. That means the search engines will see the original content on your webpage, even if the variation loads. The changes you make are applied on the client’s browser side with JavaScript, and can't be interpreted by the search engine’s indexation robots.
During a split test (testing with redirects), we use JavaScript redirects as search engines recommend. Google is aware of the practice of conducting A/B tests. You won't be penalized as long as you don’t present different versions by user-agent. For more information, read Google’s official position on this subject.
4. Why is advanced page targeting based on URL match types not available for Split URL tests?
In Split URL test, we don't have a concept of targeting and testing your variation pages based on different URL match types. Any value (with or without query parameter) that you provide for the variation URLs will automatically redirect visitors based upon the percentage of traffic you allocate for the original and variation version of your Split experiment.
5. Is there any specific time duration to run an A/B or Split URL experiment on my website? Or, How long should I run the A/B or Split URL experiments on my website?
Even though there is no specific time duration to run an A/B or Split URL experiment on your site, we recommend you to run your test until you achieve the desired statistical significance level from a representative count of visitors coming to your website.
Attaining this statistical level depends on two major factors: the overall traffic to your site and the type of experiment method you've chosen (Bayesian or Frequentist). Learn in detail about the different experiment methods available in PageSense and the factors you should consider while analyzing your test results.
6. Is multi-variant testing and tracking available in PageSense?
No, we currently don’t support multi-variant tracking in PageSense.