Steps to diagnose why you cannot see a SiteSpect Experiment on your site
When you activate a SiteSpect Experiment, Personalization or Recommendations campaign you expect to see the changes on your site shortly afterwards. In most cases this will be exactly what happens. In some instances you may not see the change, while others will. It can be confusing but there are a number of reasons why this can occur. Many of the common causes are outlined below.
- You are in the original/control experience where no change is made. You can check this by reviewing the Campaign and Variation Group IDs in your SiteSpect SSSC cookie or by checking those IDs in your SiteSpect WATTs Web Analytics integration if you have one.
- You may not be assigned to the campaign because you meet one of the Audience exclusion criteria. You can check this by reviewing the Audience exclusions within the Campaigns Audience section. If this is the case you will either need to revisit without the excluded Audience criteria or remove the Audience from the campaign.
- SiteSpect could be in Bypass which is a dormant state where SiteSpect is unable to apply changes to the site. Typically your IT teams would receive alerts about this from SiteSpect. You can validate if this is the case by checking for an RTSS header value or simply confirming if Preview works for your test page.
- If you experiment has been running for a long time it is possible you have expired from the campaign. You can find out the expiry thresholds within the campaigns Advanced Settings. Once expired from the campaign you can no longer be reassigned. You can increase the thresholds to avoid new users being expired or create a copy of the campaign and relaunch it.
- You may not have been assigned to your experiment as you have exceeded your Concurrent Assignment limit for the site. This is a threshold that manages the maximum number of experiments a user can be assigned to in their session. You can resolve this by ending any active campaigns that are no longer needed to drop below the limit, increasing the priority of the campaign you wish to be assigned to or speak to your Account Manager to agree an increase to the concurrent assignment limit.
- You are serving a winning Variation Group to 100% in your experiment. Users previously assigned to the original / control experience will not see the winning Variation Group at 100%. This is because switching the original / control [OFF] will remove users who received that experience from the campaign and assign all new users to the Variation Group at 100%. Turning the original / control to 0% will keep users in original / control and assign all new users to the Variation Group at 100%. If you believe this to the cause of your issues you can simply use the promote to all traffic feature with a copy of the campaign or migrate the build to a global variation and serve that to all traffic.
In most of the scenarios above you can use your browsers incognito/private browsing mode to validate that your existing SiteSpect cookies were stopping you from seeing the experience you were expecting. If you are unsure which of the scenarios above is the cause of your issue please contact the Help Desk at helpdesk@sitespect.com and copy your SiteSpect Consultant. When you do, the SiteSpect Support Team will reach out to support you in your investigation.