🛠️ [Troubleshooting] How to force the display of a variation?

You may want to switch from one variation to another or to force the display of a variation. Here are the 3 different ways to do so:

1. Using the QA Assistant 
2. Allocating 100% of the traffic to the desired variation
3. Modifying the ABTasty cookie value

Using the QA Assistant

We recommend using the QA Assistant to switch from one variation to another as this is the easiest method. Start by launching the QA Assistant
From the platform: 

1. Go to the QA & Overview step of your campaign.
2. Click Open QA Assistant: the URL entered in the Main information step opens in a new tab and the QA Assistant opens in a panel at the bottom of your page.

Or directly from your website page: 

1. Go to your website.
2. Press alt+Q+A (for Windows) or ctrl+Q+A (for Mac): the QA Assistant opens in a panel at the bottom of your page.

The campaigns tab is displayed by default and divided into two sections: 

• The top section “Live campaigns on this page” displays all campaigns you are affected to.
• The bottom section “Live campaigns on this website” displays all campaigns that are currently live on your website, whether you are affected to them or not.

 To switch to another variation, you must be affected to the campaign. The dropdown menu next to the campaign name allows you to select the variation you want.

Allocating 100% of the traffic to the desired variation

From the Traffic allocation step of your campaign, you can allocate 100% of the traffic to the variation you want to see. After saving the modification, you must refresh the tag in order for your changes to be taken into account in production:

You can then go to your targeted page and should see the variation. 

🚩 Heads up
Modulation changes on a live campaign apply to new visitors only (those who are seeing the campaign for the first time). A visitor who has seen one variation will always see the same variation during their sessions because the allocation information is stored in the AB Tasty cookies.
If you have previously been allocated to a variation and want to QA another one, you must clear your cookies or open a new incognito window (with all other windows closed) in order to be considered a new visitor. 

Modifying the ABTasty cookie value

AB Tasty works thanks to 2 first-party cookies. One is used as a tracking cookie, the other is a technical cookie used for various technical purposes and is stored during the current visitor session only.

Name	Purpose	Time-to-live (TTL)
ABTasty	Gathering campaign data: visitor ID, campaignHistory, timestamp and account settings	13 months

The ABTasty cookie has two parts. The first includes data and details about the visitor:

The second includes information about the campaign the visitor has been allocated to:

The Campaign ID and Variation ID can be found in the editor:

Once you retrieve the Variation ID, you can force the variation by changing the AB Tasty cookie value in your browser:

1. Go to the URL of your campaign, right click Inspect or press Ctrl+Shift+I (in Windows - Cmd+Shift+I in Mac).
2. Go to the Application tab and click Cookies in the left panel.
3. Select the URL of your website.
4. Search for the “ABTasty” cookie and click the corresponding line: you can see the cookie value with its different parameters.

In this example, 757345 corresponds to the test ID and 0 to the variation ID (the original variation will always display 0 as a variation ID).
To force the display of variation 1, you need to change the variation ID. In our example, it corresponds to 941354. 
To replace the variation ID, double click the Value column, retrieve the parameter you want to change (th) and modify it.

Refresh the page and you should be affected to the variation.