Even allocation

Even Allocation is a feature designed to promote sound experimentation practices and ensure the reliability of your A/B, Multipage, and Multivariate tests.

This article explains how Even Allocation works and how it can help you achieve more accurate test results.

What is Even Allocation?

The Even Allocation feature prevents you from allocating a higher percentage of traffic to a variation than the original traffic allocation in your campaigns. When enabled, this feature automatically adjusts traffic distribution to adhere to even allocation principles. This helps avoid skewed data and ensures that each variation receives a fair share of traffic, leading to more trustworthy results.

How Does It Work?

• Traffic Restriction: When Even Allocation is active, the platform restricts you from manually setting a variation's traffic allocation to a value exceeding the original allocation.

Good to know :

For QA purposes, we advise you to use our Quality Assurance Assistant Feature (QAA) that includes a “forced display” option to bypass targeting conditions and display campaigns, regardless of whether the targeting is validated.\

• Informational Message: When the feature is enabled, an informational message appears on the allocation page, reminding you that variation traffic cannot exceed the original traffic.

• Campaign Duplication: If you duplicate a campaign with uneven allocation while Even Allocation is enabled, the duplicated campaign's traffic will be reset to an even distribution. A warning message will alert you to this change during the duplication process.

Why Use Even Allocation?

Even Allocation promotes statistically sound experimentation by preventing common allocation mistakes. Here's why it's beneficial:\

• Prevents Skewed Results: Uneven allocation can lead to biased results, making it difficult to determine the true impact of each variation.

• Encourages Best Practices: By enforcing even allocation, the feature encourages you to follow established CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) best practices

• Ensures Fair Traffic Distribution: Even allocation ensures that each variation receives a representative sample of your website traffic, improving the validity of your test

Example Scenarios

Here are a few examples of how Even Allocation impacts traffic allocation:\

• Scenario 1: You have an A/B test with two variations. With Even Allocation enabled, the maximum allocation for each variation is 50%.

• Scenario 2: You have a Multivariate test with three variations. Even Allocation ensures that each variation receives approximately 33% of the traffic.

• Scenario 3: You have a Multipage test with three variations. Even Allocation suggests that each variation receives approximately 33% of the traffic, but you ultimately decide to allocate 33% of the traffic for the original, 33% for Variation 1, and 28% for Variation 2.

• Scenario 4: You attempt to allocate 70% of the traffic to the original and 15% to the variation in an A/B test. With Even Allocation enabled, the platform will prevent you from doing so. The allocation will stay even between the original and the variation. So you can have up to 50% traffic allocated to both the original and the variation. Or choose to have 15% traffic allocated to variation. The system will automatically allocate the same percentage (15%) to the original, and the remaining traffic (70%) will be untracked.

Good to know

• Even Allocation applies to A/B tests, Multipage tests (MTP), and Multivariate tests (MVT).

• The feature does not apply to Personalization campaigns.

• If you require 100% traffic allocation to display the campaign to all your traffic, you should probably use a Patch or Personalization campaign instead. Ally, our assistant can help you decide which campaign best fits your needs. If your campaign is already set up, you don’t have to create a new one from scratch: duplicate it with the right campaign mode. To learn How to duplicate a campaign, read our dedicated article.

• If you require 100% traffic allocation for QA purposes, use the Quality Assurance Assistant (QAA) feature with forced targeting instead. To know more about this feature, please read our article dedicated to QA Mode & QA Assistant.

Questions?

If you have any questions about Even Allocation or need help managing your account settings, please contact your Customer Success Manager.