How to Create a Page Experiment
This guide walks you through setting up a page experiment in Elevate — from selecting your page type to launching the test.
Step 1: Create an Experiment
From your Elevate dashboard, go to Experiments and click New Experiment. Select Page Experiment.
Step 2: Name Your Experiment and Write a Hypothesis
Give your experiment a descriptive name — something like "Homepage Hero Banner Test" or "PDP Layout Redesign."
Fill in the description and hypothesis fields. For example:
"Moving the reviews section above the fold on product pages will increase add-to-cart rate by making social proof visible without scrolling."
Step 3: Select Your Page Type
You'll see the following page types to choose from:
Home Page — Your store's homepage
Products Page — Product detail pages
Collections Page — Collection/category pages
Page — Custom Shopify pages (landing pages, about pages, etc.)
Cart Page — The shopping cart page
Select the page type you want to test. This determines which templates are available for your variations.
Step 4: Scope Your Experiment (Conditional)
Depending on the page type you selected, you may see additional options to narrow the scope of your experiment:
Product pages: You can optionally select specific products. If you choose "All Products," the experiment runs on every product page using the tested template. If you choose "Specific Products," it only runs on the product pages you select.
Collection pages: You can optionally select specific collections to limit the experiment to.
Custom pages: You can select which specific Shopify pages to include.
Home and Cart pages: No additional scoping needed — there's only one of each.
Step 5: Set Up Your Variations
This is where you select the alternate templates for each variation.
Control — Automatically set to your current live template. No action needed.
Variations — For each variation, select an alternate template from your theme. You can:
Pick an existing template — Choose from alternate templates already in your theme
Duplicate and customize — Create a copy of your current template and modify it in the Shopify theme editor
Use the variation count selector to add more variations if you want to test multiple designs at once.
Each variation needs a name (e.g., "Minimal Layout," "Reviews Above Fold") and a traffic percentage.
Tip: Make sure your alternate templates are ready and customized in the Shopify theme editor before selecting them here. You can access the theme editor from Online Store → Themes → Customize, then create new templates from the template picker.
Step 6: Set Traffic Allocation
By default, traffic is split evenly between your control and variations. You can adjust these percentages — just make sure they add up to 100%.
Step 7: Choose Your Experiment Goal
Select the primary metric for determining a winner:
Revenue Per Visitor — best for understanding overall revenue impact
Conversion Rate — best for measuring purchase likelihood
Average Order Value — best for testing layouts that affect cart size
Add-to-Cart Rate — best for measuring how well the page drives initial interest
Checkout Start Rate — best for measuring mid-funnel impact
Step 8: Add Audience Targeting (Optional)
Narrow your audience if needed — by device, location, traffic source, visitor type, or UTM parameters.
For the full list of targeting options, see Audience Targeting.
Step 9: Launch
Click Create Experiment to submit. The experiment moves into review status. Once ready, click Launch Experiment to go live.
After Launching
QA your experiment — Visit the tested page and verify both variations look correct. See the Page Test QA Checklist for a complete walkthrough.
Monitor results — Check the Results tab to track performance
Wait for significance — Let the experiment run until it reaches a definitive status. See Statistical Significance.
End the experiment — When ready, see Ending an Experiment
Last updated