Taking your experiments to production

Learn how to publish, QA, and launch your Sidecar experiments in production with step-by-step guidance.

Publish your Sidecar experiment to save its configuration to Statsig, QA it with a preview URL, then start it to serve variants to visitors. Publishing syncs your changes to the experiment console without starting the experiment, so you can set up metrics and targeting and test on your site first.

This guide assumes you've followed the previous steps of creating an experiment in Sidecar. Refer to Creating Experiments for those instructions.

Step 1: Publish the experiments

When you're satisfied with the experiment configuration, select the blue Publish button. Selecting Publish saves all configurations to Statsig. To verify Statsig stored the changes successfully, select the ... menu and choose Go to Experiment Console.

Publishing changes doesn't start any experiments; it does the following:

Sync any unsaved changes to Statsig (making them accessible in Console where you can configure metrics and other targeting conditions if applicable).
Include any configured tests in the Sidecar script installed on your website.
Allow you to QA experiments on your site while they're in an unstarted state.

The experiment console lets you configure targeting, metrics, and advanced statistical settings.

Statsig experiment setup tab with checklist and scorecard fields

Step 2: Preview and QA the experiment

At this point, your experiment is in a pre-started state, meaning it isn't yet active to site visitors. To preview a specific variant, pass a query string to your test page URL using the overrideuser parameter.

The override method uses the following convention to force a test and test group:

https://www.DOMAIN.com/?overrideuser=<EXPERIMENT_ID>_<TEST_GROUP_ID>

The image below shows where to find the experiment ID and each variation ID. Based on this example, force a preview of the Test Group by visiting: https://www.DOMAIN.com/?overrideuser=name_color_test_1

Sidecar experiment QA and preview interface

The override method works best with the default test and control group names. If you change a group name, you must also update it in the Statsig Console by selecting "Manage Overrides".

Step 3: Start the experiment

Refresh the page in your browser with the script embedded. Sidecar automatically detects the published experiment and displays all experiment properties.

Start the experiment by selecting the ... menu and choosing Start Experiment. Sidecar then starts the experiment, serves the correct variants for control and test groups, and begins collecting metrics.

You've successfully built and shipped an experiment.

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