VWO now offers priority and traffic weight options for mutually exclusive groups (MEG) in server side campaigns. The feature enables VWO Testing – Server Side users to prioritize and run campaigns confidently across any part of their technology stack without worrying about user overlap or skewed campaign reports. Mutually exclusive groups with priority and weight control are VWO-exclusive in the server side experimentation space.
Mutually exclusive groups on server side campaigns – a brief overview
Mutually exclusive campaign groups ensure that a user becomes part of only one server side campaign, even when the user is eligible for multiple campaigns within the mutually exclusive campaign group. VWO serves the corresponding campaign and its variation to the user after factoring in various criteria such as whether the user is whitelisted, whether the user’s campaign is found in the usage storage service, whether the user is already part of any campaign within the mutually exclusive group, user’s eligibility for campaigns within the mutually exclusive group based on targeting conditions, and campaign traffic allocation.
By preventing overlap of eligible users across campaigns running even on the same page with similar targeting conditions, you can maintain clean reports, accurately attribute conversion rate changes to the appropriate campaign, and eliminate bias.
With this new update to our mutually exclusive groups(MEG) functionality, VWO users can choose how users become part of campaigns using the following two methods:
- Random allocation – VWO to distribute users randomly across campaigns.
- Advanced allocation – VWO to distribute users based on campaign priority and weights.
What does the prioritization of campaigns within mutually exclusive groups mean in server side campaigns?
The advanced allocation for mutually exclusive VWO Testing – Server Side campaign can be configured based on priority (P1 – P30, P1 being the highest priority) and weights (1 – 100 as a percentage, where total campaign weights must add up to precisely 100).
The process of assigning a variation to a user by VWO starts only after the API is called.
VWO selects a campaign from a mutually exclusive group based on the user’s qualification criteria. The campaign’s audience selection rules include criteria such as user behavior, user attributes, traffic rules, and more that are factored in to determine which users are included in the campaign. VWO then compares the selected campaign with the campaign called in the API. If the selected campaign and the called campaign match, the user gets included in the campaign, and VWO serves one of the campaign’s variations. If not, the user does not get included in the campaign. You can read more about how VWO SDKs evaluate mutually exclusive campaigns here.
Like in client-side testing, in server side testing too, you can set priorities and weights within mutually exclusive groups or have only priorities or weights. While the mutually exclusive group can have both priorities and weights, an individual campaign within the mutually exclusive group can have either weight or priority but never both.
How do mutually exclusive groups with priority and weights help VWO customers?
Say you’re the academy manager of a top e-learning company. You would like to test multiple campaigns that increase revenue for the company. For example, you would like to run a test campaign each for annual academy subscriptions, combo course discounts, course changes, and additional test series. Instead of running these campaigns mutually exclusively with random allocation, you can prioritize campaigns in the order of the highest business impact using advanced allocation in VWO Testing – Server Side mutually exclusive group.
Maybe for you, it makes sense to assign the highest priority to the annual subscription campaign, followed by the combo discount campaign, to ensure maximum user allocation (of eligible users) since they’re prone to have the highest business impact. Between the test-series campaign and the e-learning campaign, you can choose to distribute only 30% of your traffic to the test-series campaign since it tests an additional step intended only for outlier users (top students or weak students).
Similarly, you can prioritize your server side campaigns based on your business requirements.
Want to try your hands on mutually exclusive groups with priority and weights?
Mutually exclusive groups with priority and weights are available on the following server side SDKs:
All users of the Enterprise plan of VWO Testing – Server Side, VWO Testing – Web, VWO Personalize, and VWO Deploy can explore mutually exclusive groups with priorities and weights for their optimization use cases.
Please refer to the knowledge base article to learn more about it and follow a step-by-step guide to enable it in VWO.
For any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact support@vwo.com.
