Glossary of Terms

This article includes standard terms and ideas used within the Evolv product suite and optimization program.

• API Key
• Audience
• Combination of Variants
• Context
• Continuous Optimization
• Environment
• Event
• Experience Accelerator
• Full Stack
• Idempotency
• Organization
• Phase
  • Initialization
  • Optimization
  • Comparison
• Population
• Project
• Protected Environment
• Roles
• Search Space
• Variable
• Variant
• Version
• Web Implementation

API Key

API keys help identify the environment in which an event takes place. A unique API key is automatically generated by Evolv when creating an environment. When an event occurs, the Evolv system receives both the event and the API key, and the event is logged as occurring in the appropriate environment.

Audience

Audiences are defined groups of people that can be filtered by Evolv traffic allocation systems based on their attributes. This can help you segment your users (within an account) into different categories, such as “Desktop” vs. “Mobile” users or “US” vs. “International” users. These audiences are applied to projects in the Manager, so only relevant users will enter the project.

Combination of Variants

A combination of variants - or simply a "combination" - is a specific set of variants that have been selected to be shown to a participant. Think of them as a single coherent user experience. Evolv uses combinations to test individual ideas - removing low-performing combinations and generating predicted higher-performing ones.

Context

A context is a defined set of conditions in which project variants are applied. Generally speaking, a context is based on URL-matching rules. It can be a single page or multiple pages.

Continuous Optimization

Continuous optimization allows you to add or remove ideas on-the-fly, so you don't lose precious time restarting your project over and over again. Evolv AI's algorithms respond to changes in the project's scope by initializing new ideas and removing combinations with disabled ideas, so you can keep testing and preserve the data you've collected on your best-performing ideas.

Environment

Environments are where you deploy projects. Other project changes apply to all environments.

Evolv provides a default “Production" environment. You can create and define additional environments according to how your deployment process works.

Additional environments can be used to QA and verify that projects work properly before pushing them to production.

See Environments for more detail.

Event

An event is an instance of the user behavior that you define as being important to track and optimize, such as “Add item to cart,” “Subscribe to marketing emails,” or “Submit payment info.”

Events exist at the environment level so that they can be shared and re-used across multiple projects.

See how to create an event.

Experience Accelerator

The "Experience Accelerator" is how Evolv delivers optimizations to our customers’ pages. It is a JavaScript snippet that lives on the customer's website, allocates users to optimizations, and renders the desired output. It's also responsible for collecting user behavior, like events and sessions, while an optimization is running and feeding that information back to our system.

Learn more about the Experience Accelerator.

Full Stack

A Full Stack implementation of Evolv means that you are using Evolv to experiment on and optimize digital properties beyond a front-end website. Full Stack allows you to optimize anywhere your customers interact with your brands, such as your website, iOS app, or Android app. It can also allow you to test business logic such as pricing models by hooking up other backend systems to our optimization platform through APIs.

Idempotency

Idempotency is an important concept with JavaScript variants. Variant code can run more than once. If the JavaScript is idempotent, it can run multiple times on the page, and the result is the same. 

Organization

An Organization is a way of grouping projects in the Manager. An account can have multiple organizations.

Most customers only need one Organization, which can span multiple websites, mobile apps, and other Full Stack experiences. Some customers may choose to have more than one, depending on their needs. For example, a customer or partner who manages multiple brands with no relevant traffic overlap would create a separate organization for each brand.

See how to create an organization.

Phase

A "phase" is a period of time in which the system operates a certain way within a live project. It has its own control combination, a unique experiment ID, and a clear start and end date.

Users are uniquely counted within each phase. This means a user can confirm into multiple phases and see the control in one phase and a combination of variants in another.

Initialization phase

When a project is launched, it starts in the Initialization phase. This phase is an AB test where each combination contains a single variant.

The purpose of the Initialization phase is to establish baseline data for each of the variants.

Optimization phase

When all the combinations in the Initialization phase are mature, the Initialization phase stops and the Optimization phase starts.

During optimization, the system generates combinations that contain variants from different variables, and are automatically deactivated by the system if they aren't performing well. 

Comparison phase

The Comparison phase is a manually activated phase that lets you compare selected combinations against control.

Project

A project is the user journey you’re trying to optimize, such as “Checkout process” or “email signup flow.” When you first log in to Evolv, the Projects view is loaded. Here you can get a complete overview of all the projects you’re working on within a particular account.

See how to create a project.

Protected Environment

You can mark an environment as "protected." Protected environments allow for extra safety by restricting roles that can push changes live. ‘Manager’ and ‘Admin’ may move changes live in these environments. These are environments with real, active users, where you want to be careful about who can make changes.

Roles

Users in the Manager are one of four different roles. Roles define the permissions available to a user. 

See how to invite a user to an organization.

Variable

Variables are mutually exclusive sets of variants. They should be directly driven by the hypothesis that you are trying to test. If, for instance, you think users are finding the “Add to Cart Button” hard to see and you believe that increasing the contrast between button color and the button text color will make it clearer, improving conversion rates, then you might choose to create a new variable called “CTA Contrast.” Within this variable, you can create any number of variants — for instance, “black button with white text,” “blue button with white text,” and “white button with red text.” In this case, “CTA Contrast” values will vary between different experiences.

See how to create a variable.

Variant

Variants are individual ideas within a variable. For example, within a ‘Call To Action Button Contrast’ variable, you may create variants for “black background-white text,” “blue background-white text,” and “white background-red text.”

In the Manager's Draft view, you can toggle variants on and off using the toggle switch next to each variant. You can choose to hide variants that have been disabled, but you cannot delete these variants entirely.

See how to create a variant.

Version

Every time you restart a project, it creates a new version. The first time you launch a project, that is Version 1. A new version is created when you:

• Manually stop and start the project.
• Change the audience or optimization metric.

The project history is available for you to review in the Manager.

Web Implementation

A "web implementation" of Evolv means that you are using Evolv to experiment and optimize on the web, but not anywhere else, like in a native iOS or Android mobile app.