Core concepts
The building blocks of ABlyft, explained in plain language.
This page explains the terms you will meet everywhere in ABlyft. You do not need to memorize them. Come back whenever a word is unclear.
How the pieces fit together
An A/B test answers one question: does this change make more visitors do what I want? In ABlyft, you answer it by combining a few building blocks:
| Question | Building block |
|---|---|
| Who owns the account and who can work in it? | Team |
| On which website or app do I test? | Project |
| What is the test as a whole? | Experiment |
| WHAT changes do I test? | Variations |
| WHERE does it run? | Pages |
| WHO takes part? | Audiences |
| WHAT counts as success? | Goals |
| On which site or stage may it run? | Environments |
Team
A team is your company's account. It contains your projects and your members, and it carries your plan. When you sign up, you create a team and become its owner. You can work alone and invite colleagues later, see Members & invitations.
Project
A project represents one website or application where you run experiments, for example example.com. Each project has
its own experiments, pages, audiences, goals, environments, integrations and its own snippet. Settings such as the
statistical confidence level are also set per project, see Projects.
Experiment
An experiment is one A/B test. It combines variations, pages, audiences and goals and has a status (Draft, Preview, Running or Paused), see The statuses.
Experiments that you no longer need can be archived, see Clone & archive. The full workflow is described in Start, pause & finish.
Variation
A variation is one version of your page that you test. ABlyft always compares your variations with Original, the unchanged version. You can build a variation with the Visual Editor, as a redirect to another URL, or with your own code. See Variations.
Page
A page defines the URLs on which an experiment runs, using include and exclude rules. A page is not a single web page but a rule set. You define it once in the project and reuse it in several experiments. See Pages & URL targeting.
Audience
An audience limits an experiment to certain visitors, for example only mobile visitors. Without an audience, every visitor can take part. See Audiences.
Goal
A goal defines what counts as a success, for example a click, a pageview, or a revenue value. Every experiment needs at least one goal. The first goal of an experiment is its primary goal. See Goal types.
Environment
An environment lets you run the same experiment on different websites or stages of the same project, for example live and staging, or one site per country, without duplicating your setup. See Environments.
Snippet
The snippet is a small piece of JavaScript that you add once to your website. It decides in the visitor's browser which experiment runs and which variation is shown, and it sends the measured events to ABlyft. Without the snippet no experiment can run. Your developer finds all details in Embed the snippet.
Participants and bucketing
A participant is a visitor who qualified for an experiment and was assigned to one of its variations. Bucketing is this assignment. It happens once per visitor and experiment, and the visitor then keeps seeing the same variation on later visits. ABlyft stores the assignment in the visitor's browser. How the traffic is divided is described in Traffic allocation.