Set Up Your First Split URL Experiment

Step 1: Create a New Experience

In your Experiment Dashboard you will find the "New Experience" text in the top right that indicates you can make a new experience (see screenshot below).

Step 2: Select Split URL Experiment

There are 6 experience types that you can select. Select the third one (see screenshot below), and add your Experience Name and the URL of the Original (first) site in Visual Editor URL:

Step 3: Add Variations

You will see that the Original URL is filled in on the next screen.  You will need to add the variation URLs here as well.

You can give a name to each variation and using the (plus) icon, you can add more than one variation.

The traffic will be split evenly between your original and all your variations. In the example below (see screenshot) you see we use "index2.html" as the variation and added the full URL in the Variation URL field.

Step 4: Need Regular Expressions (Optional)?

If you use Google AdWords or any other system that passes variables to your site that you want to keep, consider turning on variables with the option "Transfer Original URL Variables to the variation URL" (see screenshot below)

What this does is create a regular expression. Simply explained, it adds the following code behind the original URL:

/{0,1}(([\?&]{1}[^=]{1,}=[^=]*[&]{0,1})*)$

and to the variation it adds $1. To explain it in non-technical terms what this does, the regular expression takes everything that follows a question mark and pastes it in the variation where the $1 sign is.

Step 5: Verify Audience

When you click Continue you will be going to the Experience Summary next. Verify the Audience and check if this is the audience that you want to set up. If not, specify it by going to its configuration.

Step 6: Verify Goals

In this same Experience Summary you can change a lot, but to focus on the basics we will just verify that goals are set up properly (see screenshot below).

Step 7: Add the domains to the Project Configuration

If your new variation URL domain is different from the original, you will need to add it to the Project Configuration. All the different domains that include your variation URLs need to be added.

To do this, click on "Configuration" in the top menu:

Then click the "Active Websites" Section:

Lastly, add the second domain URL, and save it.

Step 8: Launch Experiment 

Don't forget you need to add the Project tracking code snippet to the header of your site. Please see this article for instructions on how to do this.

Now, launch your test by changing the experiment status to active. Your Experiment will then be active.