Visits and results of a running test should show up immediately. If they don’t, there are a few possible explanations:
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1. The plugin does not test admin users
If you’re browsing your site while logged in as an admin user, that admin users are not part of your running tests, so don’t expect your visits and actions to show up in the results.
Therefore, if you want to check whether Nelio A/B Testing is working or not, the first thing you have to do is the plugin to behave as if your were a regular visitor, consider:
- log out from your account,
- accessing your site from a different browser, or
- access it using Incognito Mode (or Private Browsing Mode).
2. Your website is a staging/testing environment
If your trying out the plugin in a staging/testing environment, our plugin might know it’s a staging/testing environment by looking at the site’s URL and, if it is (or if it thinks it is), it won’t track any events and will simply log in your browser’s JavaScript console an “event tracked” message. This implementation helps you quickly check out if things work as expected before pushing the changes to live. You can read this FAQ for more information about how Nelio A/B Testing plays with staging/live environments.
3. You’ve created a segmentation rule
If you’ve created a segmentation rule, only those visitors who are in the segment will participate in the test. Be sure that you are visiting the website as a visitor included in the defined segmentation rule.
4. Your website is behind a cache or CDN
The plugin is compatible with cache systems, but it does not automatically clean them. Nelio A/B Testing is able to “bypass” cache systems and return the appropriate alternative to each user, preventing all users from seeing the same cached version. However, if your site is running behind a cache, it is possible that your users are being served a cached version of your site that does not include our scripts or in which variants look like the original version.
In order to fix the issue, please make sure you clean the cache right after you activate Nelio A/B Testing as well as after start or stopping tests.
Assuming you’re browsing your website as a regular user and that caches are not interfering, it’s still possible that you see (and keep seeing) the original version. That’s because Nelio A/B Testing randomly decided that you had to see the original version (a decision that has been made permanent by storing the value in a cookie). To fix this issue, just clear your cookies before refreshing.
You can also force Nelio A/B Testing to load a specific variant. For example, if you want to see variant B of a tested page, just include two arguments in the URL: nab=1 to tell Nelio A/B Testing you want variant B (nab=0 corresponds to the control version) and nabforce to tell Nelio A/B Testing that you want to see variant B no matter what.
https://example.com/tested-page/?nab=1&nabforce5. Your theme is missing some important, required parts
WordPress themes should use some standard WordPress functions to allow third-party plugins like ours to “extend” the theme’s behavior by adding additional scripts and assets. If your theme is missing those (namely, it should call the functions wp_head in the header and wp_footer in the footer), our plugin can’t enqueue its tracking scripts and, therefore, the test doesn’t work as expected.
6. You use OptimizePress for page design
Nelio A/B Testing is compatible with OptimizePress. However, if you don’t see the results of the tests you may need to make some adjustments to your OptimizePress settings as explained in the following link:
7. There’s a compatibility issue/bug
Our plugin has been tested with a large range of specific environment. However, we cannot guarantee it will function with each and all them available in the market or with 3rd party themes and plugins. It may happen that there’s a compatibility issue/but we haven’t identified yet and needs addressing. In this case, please, contact us by filling out the form below and we’ll be happy to help you.