Have you considered defining a "Page" in Optimizely that uses Global URL targeting (docs)? This page will activate on every page where the optimizely JS snippet lives. This is the typical means of deploying a navigation menu A/B test.
If this is not possible due to the technical complexities of your navigation, you can safely run a redirect experiment for this test.
Optimizely's redirect uses a window.location.replace call, and as long as the snippet is installed high in the <head> of the page, the user will be bucketed and redirected quickly.
To test out the performance on mobile, I recommend the following steps:
- Create the experiment and redirect variation
- Create a "QA" audience (docs).
- Visit your site, appending the necessary query parameter to become eligible for the experiment
This will allow you to QA the redirect behavior as if it were a live
experiment on your site - "Preview" mode in Optimizely is merely a
preview, and not representative of the true production performance
once 'published'.
A few important SEO measures to take when launching a redirect experiment:
- Canonical tag - You should add a link tag to the head of your post-redirect page which tells Google that the canonical version of the page lives at a different URL. (docs)
- Robots.txt entry - search engines that respect this convention will skip over URLs that follow the disallow directive. Add your post-redirect page URL to this file.
