Create a layout based experiment

Layouts are the design tools in Commerce that enable you to configure the look of your web store. Within Oracle Experiments they are used as the starting point when you want to add a new experiment, or to view one that already exists.

Available via the Design page, this type of experiment runs only for your chosen layout. Once chosen, you then click the Experiments icon to view or add experiments and from here, you can make configuration changes.

To create a new layout based experiment:

1. Open the Design page in Commerce, select any layout and click the Grid View icon, then click the Experiments flask.

   Note: A red lightning bolt next to the flask icon indicates there are currently experiments in progress using this layout.

2. Select Add experiment.

   You are redirected to Oracle Commerce Experiments with the Experiment Configuration screen displayed for the chosen layout.

   Note: You can select Return to Admin from the Experiments navigation bar to return to the location from where the current experiment was launched, such as, the Design page layout, or the Marketing page.

   You will see the View experiments option available when you click the Experiments flask when experiments already exist for the chosen layout. In this case you are redirected to the Oracle Commerce Experiments dashboard which is filtered to only display experiments that use the layout you had selected as their control. If you remove the filter, Oracle Experiments displays all experiments associated with your account.

3. Configure the experiment as detailed in Configure Experiments.

An example of the configurations you can make in the final step of creating a layout based experiment could be to test how changing the existing Add to Cart button on the product detail page impacts site traffic. You can select and highlight any part of the page to make changes. So for the purposes of this example, if you were to click the Add to Cart button you will see the <div> tag highlighted. From here you can click Select Child to open the <button> tag and the Element Configuration panel displays, providing a number of configuration options. You could edit the button to make it all capital letters, change the color or style, and so on. You can also use the Target and Goals options from here to allow you to target a specific audience who would use the new Add to Cart button, and select or customize an experiment goal. See Configure the target and Configure the goals for more details.

For more information on creating this type of experiment, you can filter for Experiments topics on Cloud Customer Connect where there are several How-To examples explaining step-by-step configurations, such as, Use Case #3: Testing a Different Add to Cart Button on Product Detail Page.