What if someone needs to review your disabled BlueConic dialogues outside of the platform? The simplest method is usually to use a development or staging site, set up as a channel in BlueConic. When the dialogue is configured, you first activate it on that channel. Once it has been validated, don't just add the production channel -- your testing data will be associated with production. Use "Save As" and save the dialogue again. Also, don't forget to change the channel!
Testing BlueConic dialogues without a test environment
Fortunately there are practices that let you enable dialogues while preventing them from triggering, except to known reviewers or functional testers. Generally, this involves configuring the Who and Where tabs of your dialogue specifically for the purpose of review.
Consider two situations:
- A product manager needs to review some customized experiences delivered through BlueConic.
- Your QA team needs to test site functionality with BlueConic dialogue interactions in place.
A BlueConic login is not requisite to accomplish either goal. Depending on how restrictive you want to be with the dialogue, you have many options to share your work. You could change the Where tab to check for the existence of a query string parameter. For example, you could set "who" to all visitors, and "where" to restrict the dialogue to pages that contain reviewer=true, adding that parameter to any URL (e.g. https://www.blueconic.com/ becomes https://www.blueconic.com/?reviewer=true). This can work well in situations where you in discussion and need to show a dialogue to a specific person or group of people quickly.
Perhaps the above is not strict enough. Anyone in the world with the URL www.blueconic.com/?reviewer=true would trigger the dialogue in question. If you'd prefer to be more careful with your in-development dialogue, use the Who tab to specify a segment that you know will only include your reviewers. A nice way to do this is to set a referrer hostname that only your reviewers would have visited, such as an intranet hostname. If that is not exclusive enough, you can use this in combination with the Where tab rule mentioned earlier.
Testing dialogues with external trackers
Another nice alternative is use an external tracker to set a specific referrer hostname that only users with your external tracker URL would have in their profile:
There are other methods available, such as embedding an external tracker pixel in an email or on a team wiki page, or using BlueConic's built-in IP listener to determine who is eligible to see in-development dialogues based on IP address.
Tips for testing and troubleshooting dialogues
After testing/review is complete, use 'Save As' so there is no test data associated with your dialogue.
By creating a copy of your dialogue before activating it in production, you'll ensure there are no views, clicks, or conversions associated with the dialogue before it's been seen by any users.
For tips on testing your dialogues with the BlueConic Simulator, see the video and tips in Testing Your Dialogues. Also see the troubleshooting dialogues section.