How do I do a component test for a personalized component?

Question

I'm running Sitecore 8.1 (Original Release), using the personalization features of Sitecore. Here's what my setup looks like:

I have a "donate" banner component that is personalized based on how much money a user has donated in the past. For example, if someone gave $25 last time, I want to show them a personalized variation of the donate banner component this time. I've been able to get that to work just fine. Now I want to determine if the personalization actually increases or decreases my donations from those users. That sounds like a perfect use for Sitecore's A/B or Multivariate or Component testing. My only problem is that I can't seem to figure out how to activate any kind of content testing on my personalized content.

On this screen, when I already have personalization rules setup, it appears that the test button is disabled.

On this screen, if I start out with the tests first, then I can have Sitecore test the content, but I can't apply personalization rules (i.e. it just uses a random variation instead)

So, how do I test that personalization is bringing the result that I'm hoping for?

Answer 1

By, almost literally, stepping outside the box. If I'm reading you right, you want to test the following

Original Banner versus Personalised Banner, the latter of which can be one of 3 different data sources. One way to go about it is to swap containers as opposed to swapping content. Bit difficult to explain, but it goes like this:

Create 2 very simple components. All they do, is output a placeholder.

OriginalBannerContainer => placeholder key: "original"
PersonalisedBannerContainer => placeholder key: "personalised"

Then proceed to add the original banner to placeholder original, and set up your personalised condition banners and add these to personalised.

Then proceed to M/V test on the containers, OriginalBannerContainer and PersonalisedBannerContainer. Only one of the placeholders will be selected and Sitecore will ignore any components in the other.

There might be other ways, maybe some new trickery have appeared in recent xDBs that I've not noticed. In the past however, the above did the trick for me.