How Luria's tests work
Luria writes the tests, splits your traffic, moves it toward the winner, and keeps every change reversible.
Luria builds and runs the tests. You do not write variants, pick sample sizes, or decide when a test is finished. Your job is to set the rules and read the results.
What you'll need
- Luria installed and serving. See Install on Shopify or Install the script.
- The conversion goal you picked during onboarding (Sales, Booked calls, Leads / emails, App downloads). There is no goal selector in the dashboard.
- Nothing else. There is no test builder and no variant editor.
Steps
Step 1: Luria writes the test
Luria works from the scan run during onboarding (your homepage and your top product page) plus your answers about your goal, your current conversion rate and where your traffic comes from. From that it drafts one change at a time: a headline, a call to action, an offer line, a piece of social proof.
Step 2: A variant goes live for part of your traffic
A variant is a small patch, not a new page. Luria changes text and styling on the elements you allow, on top of the page you already have. Your theme and your files are never edited. If anything goes wrong, the visitor sees your original page exactly as if Luria were not installed.
On the Pages tab, "What Luria may touch" lists the element types Luria is allowed to use: headline, cta, offer, social proof, layout (off by default), imagery, copy body. Tap a chip to switch one off.
Always off, not negotiable: checkout legal text, privacy/terms pages, prices without approval.
Step 3: Your traffic splits, and stays split
Each visitor is assigned to control or variant by a hash of their Luria visitor id and the test. The same visitor sees the same version on every page load, so nobody watches your headline change under them. Until each arm has 200 sessions the split stays even, because a smaller sample cannot tell you anything yet.
Step 4: Traffic moves toward the winner
Once both arms are past 200 sessions, Luria recalculates the split every hour and sends more traffic to the arm that is winning. Control never drops below 10% of traffic, so you always keep a fresh comparison against your original page.
Step 5: Luria promotes or kills the test
A variant is promoted only when it is more than 95% likely to be beating control and both arms have at least 200 sessions (more when the gap between the two is small). A variant that drops below 5% likely is killed. Until one of those happens the test keeps running.
Approve first, or autonomous
On the Pages tab, "How Luria applies changes" has two buttons:
- Approve first (the default): "Every change waits for your one-click approval before going live."
- Autonomous: "Luria applies and promotes winners on its own, everything stays reversible."
Switching modes takes effect for changes drafted after the switch. See Approving changes for how a change waiting on you actually gets approved today.
Verify it worked
Open Split Tests. A running test shows a card with the test name, a status badge, the page it runs on, a bar for control and a bar for variant, the session count, "P(beat)" and an estimated gap in percentage points.
Open My Site. "What we've changed so far" lists every change with its date, the page, what it was and its status (pending approval, live, promoted, rolled back, paused or killed), plus a Roll back button on each row.
Common failures
- No cards on Split Tests. Nothing is live yet. In Approve first mode a change waits until it is approved, so check the status pill at the top right.
- Variants paused. After your first 5 free attributed conversions, variants stop serving until you upgrade. Measurement keeps running. See Plans and metering.
- Serving is off. On Shopify the theme app embed must be switched on and the Data Processing Terms approved in the app. Full checklist in No variants serving.
- The numbers barely move. Below 200 sessions per arm the split is deliberately even and the estimates swing. That is the honest state, not a fault.