How to Create a Theme Experiment

This guide walks you through setting up a theme experiment in Elevate — from selecting your themes to launching the test.

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Before You Start

Make sure your variation theme is ready:

• The theme is in your Shopify theme library (Online Store → Themes) as an unpublished theme

• It's fully customized — all pages, sections, and settings are configured

• Third-party apps that inject into the theme (reviews, chat, upsells) are working on it

• You've previewed it in Shopify and confirmed it looks correct across all page types

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Step 1: Create an Experiment

From your Elevate dashboard, go to Experiments and click New Experiment. Select Theme Experiment.

Step 2: General Info and Goal

Enter your experiment details:

• Name — Something descriptive like "New Dawn Theme vs Current" or "Holiday Theme Test"

• Description — What you're testing and why

• Hypothesis — What you expect to happen

For example:

"Our new minimalist theme will increase revenue per visitor by reducing visual clutter and making the Add to Cart button more prominent across all product pages."

Choose your experiment goal. Revenue Per Visitor is the default and typically the best choice for theme tests, since a theme change affects the entire shopping experience — not just one metric.

Step 3: Set Up Variations

You'll see two sections:

Control — Automatically set to your current published theme. The theme name and ID are pulled from your store. No action needed.

Variation(s) — For each variation, click Select Theme to pick an unpublished theme from your Shopify theme library. Elevate shows all available unpublished themes for you to choose from.

Each variation gets a name (e.g., "Minimalist Theme," "Holiday Layout") and a traffic percentage.

You can add more than two variations if you want to test multiple themes simultaneously — for example, comparing your current theme against two different redesigns.

Important: Only unpublished themes can be selected as variations. The control is always your currently published theme.

Step 4: Traffic Allocation

Set how traffic is split between your themes. The default is an even split (e.g., 50/50 for two variations).

You can adjust these percentages — just make sure they add up to 100%. If you want to be cautious, start with a lower percentage for the variation (e.g., 70/30) to limit exposure while you validate the experience.

Step 5: Add Audience Targeting (Optional)

Narrow your audience if needed — by device, location, traffic source, visitor type, or UTM parameters.

For example, you might want to:

• Test the new theme only on mobile visitors first, since that's where most layout differences are felt

• Limit the test to visitors from a specific country if the theme redesign targets a particular market

• Run the test only for new visitors to get unbiased first impressions

For the full list of targeting options, see Audience Targeting.

Step 6: Review and Launch

Review your experiment configuration:

• Verify the correct themes are assigned to each variation

• Confirm traffic percentages look right

• Check any audience targeting rules

Click Create Experiment to submit. The experiment moves into review status. Once you've completed QA, click Launch Experiment to go live.

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Quality Assurance

Theme experiments require thorough QA since you're testing an entire store experience. After launching:

Check Every Major Page Type

Visit each of these on the variation theme:

• Homepage — Layout, hero section, featured collections, navigation

• Product pages — Images, descriptions, Add to Cart button, reviews, variant selectors

• Collection pages — Grid layout, filters, sorting, pagination

• Cart page — Cart items display correctly, upsells work, checkout button functions

• Checkout — Verify the full checkout flow works end to end

Verify Third-Party Apps

• Reviews widget displays on product pages

• Chat widget loads

• Upsell/cross-sell popups appear

• Subscription options work

• Trust badges and payment icons display

Test on Multiple Devices

• Desktop — full-width browser

• Mobile — phone-sized viewport

• Tablet — if relevant to your audience

Confirm Tracking

• Visit the store and check that a page view event appears in the Raw Data tab

• Verify the correct variation ID is assigned

• Complete a test purchase and confirm the order appears in the experiment data

Verify the Elevate Snippet

The Liquid Snippet must be present on both the published theme and the variation theme. If it's missing from the variation theme, visitors assigned to that variation won't be tracked. Elevate installs this automatically, but confirm it's there by previewing the variation theme and checking that experiment assignment is working.

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After Launching

• Monitor closely in the first 24 hours — Theme tests affect every visitor's experience, so watch for any issues early

• Check results — Use 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. If the variation wins and you want to make it permanent, publish the winning theme in Shopify.