Pages and URL targets

Pages are reusable templates that tell Optimizely Experimentation where and when to deliver experiments, personalized experiences, and recommendations on your site. For example, a page might run an experiment on your homepage (where) immediately on initial page load (when).

You can tie Optimizely Experimentation pages to a specific URL or pattern of URLs on your website. You also can apply them globally across your entire website.

• Set up pages in advance or in real-time – Build pages that target the most important parts of your site when you set up Optimizely Experimentation. Add more as you go when creating experiments or personalization campaigns.
• Reuse pages and save time – Build templates for common URL targeting patterns and activation modes for key parts of your site. Add them to any future experiment or campaign and make adjustments.

Create a page in Optimizely Web Experimentation, and read on for how pages work in Optimizely Experimentation and how you might use them.

Pages exist in projects, which are workspaces in your Optimizely Experimentation account that are available to a set of collaborators. When you create a page in a project, you can use it with other experiments in that project.

Pages use URL targeting to identify one of the following to personalize or experiment on your site:

• A single URL, such as a homepage, where you want to change the experience.

• A set of URLs that share the same template, such as the product detail site pages on an e-commerce site.

• A global URL that targets web pages with the Optimizely Experimentation snippet to change elements, such as a navigation menu, that appear across the site pages.

In the boundaries of your project, use the URL patterns to group parts of your site as pages in Optimizely Experimentation.

Optimizely Experimentation activates pages using a set of triggers and conditions. If you have a traditional, static website, you may use the default activation mode—Immediate—to activate the page when the Optimizely Experimentation snippet loads.

Use cases for pages

Common use cases for Optimizely Experimentation pages:

• Run site-wide experiments on global components like a navigation bar or footer, or targeting click metrics on elements that exist across the site.

• Test feedback solicitation modals or other pop-ups that appear site-wide.

• Track metrics between variations of a redirect experiment, in which both the original and redirect URLs are targeted.

• Run experiments across cart funnels, cart flows, or sign-up flows.

• Exclude certain site pages—like checkout or cart—from an experiment, or excluding certain visitors based on their login status, or excluding the entire site except for certain site pages (for example, international pages).

• Target categories of related site pages (for example, search results site pages, PDPs, support pages or knowledge articles, and landing pages) as a way of streamlining the process of setting up experiments involving those sections of the site.

• Bind visual tags to site pages.

• Target each instance in multi-level environments; this way, you can avoid automatically creating a duplicate site page when the instance is promoted to the next environment.