A/B Experiments for Landing Pages

With Landing Page A/B Experiments you can test different versions of a landing page against each other without having to maintain two separate pages. Components on the page (teasers, banners, product lists, promotions, etc.) are tagged with a variant marker (A, B, C) directly inside the Page Editor. Makaira then plays out the variants according to the traffic distribution you defined and measures performance against your real visitors.

Typical questions you can answer with this:

Does a different hero teaser drive more revenue?
Which arrangement of product lists has a lower bounce rate?
Does an additional promotion banner increase conversions or hurt visit length?

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Landing Page A/B testing is part of the Makaira A/B Experiments module and requires the Page Editor. See Requirements below.

Requirements

The A/B Experiments module is booked
The Page Editor module is booked
Use of a current version of Makaira Connect (from version 2.6.4) or Makaira Connect Legacy (from version 2021.2.3), or the current Makaira Storefront
Makaira tracking is active (see Tracking → Integrations / A/B Testing tag for Google Tag Manager)
The Landing page / generic page view tag is active in your tag manager and fires on every non-product / non-category / non-search page (see Tracking → Tags)

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Without the landing page page-view tag, Matomo records no pageviews for landing pages — the A/B Experiments → Results view will then show empty metrics (no visits, no bounce rate, no orders attribution) even if visitors are actually reaching the page. This is the single most common reason a landing page experiment "looks broken". Verify the tag is firing using your tag manager's preview mode before starting the test.

How it differs from other A/B test types

Unlike Ranking Mix, Personalization, Recommendation or Frontend tests, a landing page experiment is bound to one specific landing page. The "B scenario" is not a separate configuration interface — instead, you stay inside the regular Page Editor and use the variant marker on each component to define which version it belongs to.

Other key differences:

Up to 5 landing page experiments can run in parallel (other test types: only one per instance).
Each landing page can have only one active experiment at a time. Landing pages already in a running experiment are filtered out when creating a new test.
The winner is applied by clicking "set live" in the result view, which permanently writes the chosen variant back to the page.

Setting up a Landing Page A/B test

1. Assign variants to components in the Page Editor

Prepare the landing page before creating the A/B experiment. Open the page in the Page Editor and mark each component with the variant it belongs to — the experiment will pick up these assignments when you create it in the next step.

For each component on the page you can decide whether it belongs to:

Variant A (original) — the unchanged version
Variant B
Variant C (optional)

To assign a variant to a component:

Open the component's context menu (the three-dot menu next to the component).
Hover over AB Testing and choose Variant A, Variant B, or Variant C.
A component without a variant marker is shown to all visitors regardless of the assigned group.

You can preview each variant directly in the Page Editor using the variant selector in the live preview header (All components / No variant / Variant A / Variant B / Variant C). The selection is reflected in the preview URL via the ab-variant parameter, so the storefront live preview shows exactly what a visitor in that group would see.

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Tagging variants is safe while editing — nothing changes for live visitors until you start the experiment. As long as no experiment is running, every visitor sees the page exactly as if no variants existed: components tagged Variant A are shown (they are the original), components tagged Variant B or Variant C are hidden from live traffic and only appear in the preview when you pick that variant in the selector. Once the experiment is started, the traffic split kicks in and B/C content starts being served to the configured share of visitors.

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Make sure you have at least one component assigned to Variant B (and, if applicable, Variant C) before starting the test. Without variant-tagged content, an experiment will not produce meaningful results.

2. Create the experiment

Once the variants are assigned, create the A/B experiment that will play them out:

Open A/B Experiments in Makaira and click Create a test.
Under Type of test, choose Landingpage.
In Select landingpage, pick the landing page you prepared in step 1.
Only landing pages that are not currently part of a running experiment appear in this list.
Give the test a meaningful name (e.g. Hero teaser — variant test Q2).
Click Proceed to test configuration.

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A landing page experiment supports up to three variants: A (original), B, and C. The version selector that other test types show is hidden here — variants are defined directly on the page content (see previous step).

3. Define the traffic split

In the experiment configuration step, set how traffic is divided between the variants:

For a two-variant test (A/B): e.g. A 50% / B 50%.
For a three-variant test (A/B/C): e.g. A 40% / B 30% / C 30%.

The percentages must add up to 100. A minimum of 1% must remain with the original (A).

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Traffic distribution cannot be changed once the test has started. This is by design — modifying the split mid-flight would invalidate the statistical evaluation.

4. Start the experiment

Click Start experiment. Visitors are now assigned to a group based on your traffic split, and Matomo begins collecting data for each variant.

A running landing page experiment is visible in two places:

In the A/B Experiments list (status "running").
On the landing page itself in the Page Editor — the page is locked for general editing while the experiment runs to prevent inconsistent measurement.

Evaluating a Landing Page experiment

While the experiment is running and after it has stopped, you can open the results panel from the A/B Experiments overview by clicking the statistics icon.

For landing page experiments the following metrics are tracked per variant:

Metric	What it means
Unique Pageviews	Number of unique visits to the landing page
Pageviews	Total pageviews
Bounce Rate	Share of visits that left after viewing only this page
Exit Rate	Share of sessions that ended on this page
Avg. Time on Page	Average time visitors spent on the page
Orders	Number of orders attributed to the visit
Bought Products	Number of products bought
Revenue	Revenue attributed to the visit
Average Visit Length	Average length of the visit

For each metric you also see:

Average / per visit — normalized value per visit
Detected effect — relative change vs. the original variant in %
Significance rate — statistical confidence that the difference is real (< 50 % is shown when the data is too thin to be reliable)
Traffic split — the configured distribution

The chart view shows the development of the selected metric per day, including confidence bands so you can judge whether the difference between variants is settling or still noisy.

Setting the winner live

Once you are confident in the result, you can apply a variant permanently to the landing page:

In the result table, in the Status row, click set live under the variant you want to keep.
Makaira rewrites the landing page so that the components tagged for the chosen variant become the new default content.
The experiment is marked as finished and the page is unlocked for normal editing.

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Only one variant can be set live per experiment. After a winner has been applied you will see "Variation X has been set live." in the result panel and the set live buttons are no longer available.

If you decide that none of the variants is convincing, you can simply stop the experiment without applying a variant — the page reverts to its original (A) configuration.

Stopping an experiment

You can stop a running landing page experiment at any time by clicking Stop experiment in the experiment detail view.

Stopping without clicking set live keeps the original (A) configuration as the live page.
Stopping and then clicking set live on a variant promotes that variant to the live configuration.

Once stopped, the experiment is read-only and its result is archived. You can open the result view again later from the A/B Experiments overview.

Limits and constraints

Maximum 5 landing page experiments can run in parallel. Once this limit is reached, additional experiments cannot be started until one of the running tests is stopped.
Only one experiment per landing page at any time. Landing pages already covered by a running experiment are hidden in the Select landingpage picker.
If the landing page used by an experiment is deleted while the test is running, the experiment is automatically marked as outdated and can no longer be activated. The result view remains accessible for historical reference.
Traffic distribution is immutable after the experiment has been started.

A/B testing in the storefront

No additional code is required in the storefront for landing page experiments — variant resolution happens server-side based on the visitor's group assignment from Makaira tracking. The storefront renders the page exactly as it would render any other landing page; only the components matching the visitor's assigned variant are returned.

If you also want to combine landing page experiments with frontend-level conditionals (e.g. hiding/showing arbitrary elements outside the landing page itself), the standard useAbTesting helper continues to work. See A/B Experiments → A/B testing in the frontend.

_{* Landing Page A/B Experiments are available when you book the Makaira A/B Experiments module together with the Page Editor module.}