如果我有针对页面运行的google实验，是否可以仅通过删除chooseVariation调用来有效地暂停实验？

Question

If I have an google experiment running against a page, can I effectively pause the experiment by removing the chooseVariation call, or will the subsequent call to ga('send', 'pageview') still register the visitor in a participant in the experiment?

The powers that be want to pause a checkout experiment for a weekend to try a weekend-only special offer, and I'm trying to find a way to accomplish this without flat-out destroying all tracking for the period

Answer 1

@DaImTo: I think this is programming related, since Google doesn't allow to pause an experiment over their web interface, but there is a 'hack' to achieve this:

Removing only the cxApi.chooseVariation() call will not help with visitors that have been already exposed to the experiment. Google Analytics Content Experiments are using the __utmx and __utmxx cookies to send experiment data along with your analytics tracking calls. Therefore you'll need to

1. remove cxApi.chooseVariation() to prevent the creation of new cookies
2. remove the experiment cookies to prevent tracking returning visitors

If you want to reenable tracking you will have to save the experiment cookies before removing them from the client-side and be able to associate them with a specific user (you might just rename the cookie). Reapply the experiment cookies to continue experiment tracking.

But be aware, the experiment cookies are tracking all started experiments. So if you are running multiple experiments, and you want to pause only a subset, you'll need to rewrite the cookies (temporarily removing just the experiment's data to be paused from the cookie).

If you remove the experiment cookies permanently, returning users might see a different variation and/or be included/excluded in/from the experiment where before they've been not.