Favorite Feature: Global Variations

SiteSpect’s Customer Services team know the tool better than anyone. From building campaigns to advising on optimization strategy they use every feature SiteSpect has to offer. In this blog, Andrew Herz, one of SiteSpect’s Solutions Developers walks through his favorite feature.

Favorite Feature

Global Variations, located in the left navigation bar under Components.

How does it work?

It enables to you to make changes to your website without having to build a campaign. Just like variations in campaigns, you can set a trigger condition of when to apply the change, what to look for, and what to replace it with. It has two scopes (Site and Campaign) and allows you to adjust when to apply it even further such as apply to test traffic only or preview traffic. 

What are the benefits and when would someone use the feature?

Campaign scope is great if you want to build some client-side metric logic for a campaign. Instead of having to build and maintain a script for each variation group in a campaign, you can build a single script and use a global variation with its scope set to campaign, attach it to a campaign and it will apply to all users assigned to that campaign. It makes code maintenance easier, and only applies the script to user sessions that it’s relevant to which helps reduce bloat. Since it’s tied to campaigns, you don’t need to turn it off when you’re done with the campaign. It only applies to users when they’re assigned to the campaign while it’s active. It can also be assigned to multiple campaigns if the user wishes so they can reuse their code easily.

Site scope by default targets all traffic. If you have a script for some client-side metrics that you want applied to all users at all times you can use this scope. Is there something broken on your site that a change to the page source can fix? You can use this scope to immediately make the change while you wait on your IT team to fix the issue and push it out to production.

It’s also a feature used to put WATTS data on sites along with a script to help get the data where it needs to go.

Why is it your Favorite Feature?

I like it for its versatility. I can use it to help manage scripts on websites so they’re easier to maintain, reduces the amount of work I need to do, and lets me react to changes a website may need quicker than their IT department might be able to.

To learn more about SiteSpect, visit our website.