Preview and publish an experiment

This article describes how to preview and publish your experiment in Dynamics 365 Commerce after you've connected your experiment and edited your variations. The following diagram shows all of the steps involved in setting up and running an experiment on an e-Commerce website in Dynamics 365 Commerce. Additional steps are covered in separate articles.

Preview your experiment variations

You can preview your variations and continue editing them until they look the way you want them to.

To preview your experiment variations in Commerce site builder, follow these steps.

1. From the variations drop-down menu below the command bar, select the content you want to preview.
2. On the command bar, select Preview. A preview of what the content will look like when it's published is displayed.
3. To preview a different variation, select it from the variation drop-down menu and select Preview again.

Publish your experiment

If you aren't using a publish group to schedule when your experiment goes live and you want to publish immediately, select Publish in the command bar. All variations that belong to the experiment will be published.

Important

If the page has an unpublished URL, you must first publish the URL or it won't be visible to your website users. For details, see Save, preview, and publish a page.

Use publish groups to schedule when your experiment goes live

Variations created in site builder can be scheduled for publishing by using a publish group. Within a publish group, you can connect a page or fragment to your experiment by selecting Experiments in the left navigation pane. You can also do this by selecting Pages or Fragments and following the instructions in Connect an experiment and edit variations. For information about publish groups, see Work with publish groups.

When using publish groups with experiments, there are some important considerations to be aware of.

• When you add a page or fragment that has an experiment running on it to a publish group, the experiment will be removed from the page or fragment in the publish group.
• Experiments that are connected to pages in a live site aren't available to pages within publish groups and vice-versa. Similarly, pages that have experiments running on them in a live site aren't available to other experiments in publish groups and vice versa.
• When you publish or schedule a publish group, all content in the publish group is published, regardless of whether there's an experiment associated with the publish group.
• Because a publish group continues to persist after it's been published to a live site, experiments in the publish group will also persist. Therefore, you won't be able to associate other experiments with the same page or fragment. To avoid this limitation, delete any publish groups with persisting experiments. Similarly, if you want to delete an experiment in a live site that also exists in a publish group, delete it from the publish group first.

Force variations for testing

Once the experiment is live, you can append the experiment ID and variation ID to the default page URL to force a variation for testing or automation purposes. For example, if the default page URL is https://fabrikam.com/modern/homepage, you can force a variation with a URL like https://fabrikam.com/modern/homepage?exp=18012910471|18024360464. You can get the experiment ID and variation ID for your experiment variation from the preview URL in the Preview experience explained above.

Previous step

Connect and edit an experiment

Next step

Run and monitor an experiment