Visitor Attribution

How does Shoplift attribute visitors to tests?

When a website visitor arrives on your site, Shoplift will create a unique identifier in their browser and track any associated website events that they perform, like pageviews, cart adds, checkouts, and orders.

If you have a test running and the visitor visits a page that is part of the test (and the visitor is within a valid audience for the test), Shoplift will allocate that visitor into a test "bucket", either A or B. From that point forward, any events that the visitor performs will be attributed to the tested variation that they experience. Events that occurred before reaching a tested page will not be counted towards the test.

In other words: if a test could have any impact on a visitor's behavior, then that behavior is recorded and attributed to the test. For example, if you are running a product page test and a visitor encounters a tested product page, they will be included in the test and shown either the A or B variant. Then, if that same visitor places an order elsewhere on your website, that order as well as other events they've performed will be attributed to the test variant that they encountered.

For more information on the technical details of our tracking apparatus, see Web Pixel and Liquid Snippet.

FAQ: Do you exclude bot traffic from your reporting?

We do! We've implemented advanced bot blockers that prevent most bots from impacting your test data, including crawlers from major search engines, like Googlebot.

Can visitors be part of multiple tests at the same time?

It depends! If you are running tests that have any sort of overlap and would significantly impact the results of the test, we leverage a "mutual exclusion" rule that will prevent the visitor from experiencing and being included in more than one test. For more information and specific details, see Running Multiple Tests Simultaneously.