Verify measurement
Check with the QA tool and the Live Log that your goals are measured before you rely on results.
A goal that is configured but never fires leads to an experiment without usable results. Check your measurement before you start an experiment, and again shortly after the start. You have two tools for this: the QA tool shows what happens in your own browser, and the Live Log shows what arrives at ABlyft.
Check goals with the QA tool
The QA tool is a small panel that appears on your website. It has the tabs Pages, Experiments and Goals. The Goals tab ("Goal events on this page") lists every goal that your browser triggered, with the columns Name, Type, Counting, Value and Triggered (for example "12 secs ago").
To open it:
- Open the experiment and find the preview section ("Use the Preview Mode to check a variation").
- Select the Variation to preview and check the URL to preview.
- Click Open with quality assurance tool.
- On your website, do what a visitor would do: open the page for a pageview goal, click the element for a click goal, or run the action that calls your custom or revenue code.
- Watch the Goals tab. A row appears each time a goal is triggered.
For custom and revenue goals, check the Value column: it shows the value you passed to the call, or "none".
Preview events are not counted
In preview mode and in the QA tool, goals are recorded for display only and are not sent to ABlyft. Your tests do not change the results of the experiment, and the goal events do not reach the Live Log. To see real events in the Live Log, visit your website normally, without the preview link.
Developers can read the same list in the browser console with ablyft.get('pingedGoals'), see
ablyft.get().
Check events in the Live Log
The Live Log shows the latest events that your website sent to ABlyft.
- Open your project and go to Project → Activity Log → Live Log.
- Visit your website in another tab, as a normal visitor.
- Return to the Live Log and click Refresh. The page does not update itself.
The Live Log shows the latest 100 events of the project. Above the table, three charts summarize them:
| Chart | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Events per hour | The event rate, based on the number of events currently loaded, with a small trend line. |
| Device split | A doughnut chart of the devices (mobile, desktop, tablet, other) in percent. |
| Event type split | A bar chart of the event types, such as bucketing, pageview or click, in percent. |
Read the table
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Occurred | Time of the event. |
| Event | Type: Bucketing, Pageview, Click, Custom or Revenue. |
| Goal | Name of the goal, with a link to it. Shows "counting" plus the measurement type. |
| Value | For Bucketing: the ID of the variation. For Custom and Revenue: the event value. |
| Variations (IDs) | The variations the visitor was assigned to when the event happened. |
| Source, Snippet version | Where the event came from and which snippet version sent it. |
| Attributes | Extra data of the event, such as the device type. |
Further columns can be switched on in the column menu: Processed (whether the event has already been transferred to the results), First bucketing (marks the first assignment of a visitor) and Lock ID (technical ID of the event). You can search the table and filter it by Event, Device type and First bucketing.
A Bucketing event means a visitor was assigned to a variation. Use the Live Log to check that Bucketing events appear after you opened an experiment page (the snippet reaches the tracker), and that a goal appears with the expected Value after you triggered it.
Checklist before you start
- The snippet is installed on every page where a goal can happen, including the page after a click, see Embed the snippet.
- Pageview and click goals are linked to the right Page, and the page matches the URL you are testing.
- The CSS selector of click goals matches the element you want to track.
- Custom and revenue goals use the same API Name as in your code. Unknown names are ignored silently.
- Revenue values are numbers without currency sign, see Revenue tracking.
- After the start, the Live Log shows Bucketing events and the goal events that you expect.
No events in the Live Log?
Check that the snippet is published and installed, that your consent settings do not block tracking, and that you did not visit with a preview link. See Common issues for developers.
Next steps
- Goal types if a goal does not trigger as expected
- Implausible results if the numbers look wrong
- Metrics to understand the results of your goals