Optimizely Web Experimentation

Send your event data from RudderStack to Optimizely Web.

5 minute read

Optimizely Web Experimentation (formerly Optimizely Web) lets you you test and experiment new features on your website. It is typically used by marketing teams and product managers to learn more about the customers’ product journey, and test new features to boost conversion rates and overall customer engagement.

Getting started

RudderStack supports sending event data to Optimizely Web via the following connection modes:

Connection Mode	Web	Mobile	Server
Device mode	Supported	-	-
Cloud mode	-	-	-

Based on your website’s content security policy, you might need to allowlist the domain from where you are loading the Optimizely Web SDK.

Once you have confirmed that the source platform supports sending events to Optimizely Web Experimentation, follow these steps:

Define custom events in the Optimizely Dashboard and add those events as metrics in the corresponding experiments.
Add the Optimizely Web Experimentation snippet to your web page immediately after the opening <head> tag. Then, include the RudderStack JavaScript snippet.
From your RudderStack dashboard, add the source. Then, from the list of destinations, select Optimizely Web.
Assign a name to your destination and click Continue.

Connection settings

To successfully configure Optimizely Web Experimentation as a destination, you will need to configure the following settings:

Send experiment data to other tools: By enabling this setting, you can send your experiment or campaign data to other destinations connected to the same source.
- As a track call: When this setting is enabled, an Experiment Viewed track event will be sent to RudderStack along with other configured destinations for each active experiments per page load. The properties of this event will be Optimizely’s experiment metadata.
- As identify call: When this setting is enabled, an identify call will be sent to RudderStack and other configured destinations, with the traits as experiment name and variation name .
Send experiment viewed event as non-interaction event: In case you want to send the Experiment Viewed track event to Google Analytics, enable this setting. The trackevent will then be sent to Google Analytics as a non-interaction event, i.e. an additional property nonInteraction with value 1 will be appended to the properties of that event.
Revenue on Order Completed event: Enabling this setting will send revenue as a property of the trackonly for the events with event name Order Completed.
Track categorized pages: Enabling this setting will send page calls to Optimizely Web having category as track events.
Track named pages: Enabling this will send page calls having name as track events to Optimizely Web.
Custom campaign properties: In this section, provide the mapping of the campaign metadata to the RudderStack track event properties for the Experiment Viewed event. Please note that the event property should be the track event property and the campaign property should be the corresponding metadata of the campaign.
Client-side Events Filtering: This setting lets you specify which events should be blocked or allowed to flow through to Optimizely Web Experimentation. For more information on this setting, refer to the Client-side Events Filtering guide.
Use device mode to send events: As this is a web device mode-only destination, this setting is enabled by default and cannot be disabled.
OneTrust Cookie Categories: This setting lets you associate OneTrust cookie consent groups to Optimizely.

Page

If you have enabled the Track Categorized Pages or Track Named Pages dashboarding setting, then RudderStack sends a page call having a name or category as a track event with the event name as Viewed ${category} page or Viewed ${name} page to Optimizely.

A sample page call is shown below:

// "home" is the name of the page.
rudderanalytics.page("home");

Track

RudderStack sends a track call to Optimizely with a valid event name associated with an active experiment.

If you have enabled the Revenue on Order Completed event dashboard setting, then RudderStack sends the revenue property only for the Order Completed event and not for any other event.

RudderStack converts the value of revenue to cents before passing it to Optimizely. Thus, $5 will be converted to 500 cents.

If Revenue on Order Completed event is disabled in the dashboard, then the property is passed as is, without any conversion.

A sample track call is as shown below:

rudderanalytics.track("Order Completed", {
  revenue: 30,
  value: 30.0,
})

Sending experiment data

If the Send experiment data as track call dashboard setting is enabled while configuring the destination, RudderStack automatically records and sends a web experiment as a track event with Experiment Viewed as the event name and the experiment metadata as the event properties.

You can then send this track event to the other destinations (connected to the same source in RudderStack) to analyze the experimentation results.

This track event call consists of the following properties:

campaignName
campaignId
experimentId
experimentName
variationName
variationId
audienceId
audienceName
nonInteraction

If you provide the custom campaign properties in the destination settings, then the campaign metadata key will be overridden by the corresponding event properties.

A sample track call is shown below:

rudderanalytics.track("Experiment Viewed", {
  campaignName: "test campaign",
  campaignId: "1234567890",
  experimentId: "0123456789",
  experimentName: "test experiment",
  variationId: "1122334455",
  variationName: "test variation",
  audienceId: "1212121212",
  audienceName: "sample audience",
  nonInteraction: 1,
})

If the Send experiment data as identify call dashboard setting is enabled, RudderStack sends an identify event with the following traits for each active experiment:

experimentName
variationName

You can then send this identify event to the other destinations (connected to the same source in RudderStack) to analyze the experimentation results.

Note that:

In case multiple experiments are active, then multiple identify events are triggered.
RudderStack persists the identify traits for the subsequent identify calls, that is, the identify calls contain the previous identify traits as well.

A sample identify call is as shown:

rudderanalytics.identify({
    `Experiment: ${experimentName}` : variationName
});

FAQ

Do I need to add Optimizely Web’s JavaScript snippet to my website?

Yes. You need to add the Optimizely Web snippet immediately after the opening <head> tag of your web page. Then, include the JavaScript snippet of RudderStack.

Why I am not able to see the events in my experiments?

Define the custom events in Optimizely Web’s dashboard and add those events as metrics in corresponding Optimizely ’s experiment.

While defining the custom event, you need to provide an API Name and while using RudderStack’s track API, use this API name as the event name.

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