Drift - How to Test a Bot Playbook
The article explains how to test Drift Bot Playbooks before deployment using DriftLinks to preview the Playbook within a website context and Conversational Landing Pages (CLPs) to focus on the Playbook flow, noting that these features require a Premium plan and that test conversations are hidden by default but can be toggled in settings.
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Drift - How to Test a Bot Playbook
- Sep 10, 2024
- Knowledge
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The visual builder is a great tool to help you map out and plan the logical flow of your Playbook, but we know that it's important to test your Playbooks before you deploy them on your site!
Two features within Drift lend themselves perfectly to testing Bot Playbooks - DriftLinks and Conversational Landing Pages (CLPs).
At a glance, use
- DriftLinks if you want to see how your Playbook will look within the context of your website
- Conversational Landing Pages (CLPs) if you want to focus on the flow of your Playbook.
Billing Plan: Bot Playbooks, DriftLinks, and Landing Pages are available on the Premium plan and above.
In this article, we'll cover:
- Getting Started: Building something to Test
- Testing with DriftLinks
- Testing with Conversational Landing Pages
- Testing with Integrations
Note: Any conversation started through the playbook testing workflow or through driftlinks will be hidden by default. If you wish to change this you can navigate to Settings > Conversations > Test conversations and click the toggle.
Getting Started
You have to build a Playbook before you can test one!
- 1.Log into Drift and navigate to your Playbooks tab within the app
- 2.Click the green " Create new Playbook" button on the top right corner
- 3.Choose a Playbook type and hit the blue " Create my Playbook" button after naming your Playbook.
- 4.Customize the Playbook's messages, questions, CTAs, etc..
Need some inspiration? Check out some live examples from our customers!
If you're looking for more clarification on how to build bot Playbooks, click here!
Now, onto the testing!
The easiest way to test a playbook is to utilize the Preview bot flow button on the Playbook Editor. (As seen below)
The Preview bot flow button will allow you to view your playbook on a URL as if it were live! However there are a few things to make note of if you find that your test link isn't working:
- 1.Make sure Drift is installed on the site you are testing on or else the bot won’t fire.
- 2.If you notice no URL is in the dropdown to test, add a quick "URL is [insert url here]" targeting condition and publish. This will then generate your test link! After you are done testing, you can remove this condition and publish again.
- 3.Sometime test links are dead and will not work at first. If you add "www." to the beginning of the test link and hit enter again the link should work!
- 4.When using the Preview Bot Flow, the widget will auto-open without needing to be clicked and will bypass any hook message that is in your playbook since you'll be experiencing the chat starting from the point where someone has already clicked on the widget.
Please make sure that you follow these instructions closely to avoid rolling out Playbooks to your customers before they're ready!
If you are testing your playbook using the "Test" button on your flow builder page (shown above), it is important to note that the following skills will not happen in your test conversation for the following reasons:
- 1.Email Capture and Phone Capture - These skills will not fire if Drift already has this information. To test it as a new site visitor, you can open the test link in a new incognito browser window, and the skills should fire.
- 2.Book A Meeting - The user's calendar will not be dropped in the conversation. This is expected test link behavior.
- 3.Team Availability - This bot skill will not happen even if you, as the tester, are waiting for a response. This is expected behavior.
These playbook features will fire as expected when the playbook is live on your site. If you are experiencing issues with this, please chat in to our Support Team with the URL link to the conversation.
Alternatively, you can test using DriftLinks
DriftLinks can be thought of as unique IDs for a Playbook preceded by a hashtag. When you append these to the end of a URL on your site domain, they trigger your widget to open a conversation from that specific Playbook.
DriftLinks are great for
- visualizing how the widget will open the conversation sidebar after a visitor actively clicks and engages with a bot greeting and question
- checking whether the chat is blocking any important content on your website
- essentially getting the "true" end user experience
OK, but how does this really work?
The DriftLink tab
Once you've built your Playbook, click on DriftLink along the top navigation bar. Make sure to check the box next to" Only fire when #DriftLink is present" toggle first, to ensure your Playbook does not show up on your website to everyone! Choose a unique DriftLink to use for this Playbook.
Warning:
Using a DriftLink will override any and all targeting conditions you've set up within the "Audience" tab.
You might have noticed the " Advanced" section. If you have a technical teammate, they can easily copy and paste the JavaScript snippet into the console of a webpage and use it to trigger a Playbook.
Testing with Conversational Landing Pages
This method of testing bot playbooks will only work for bot playbooks built before 2020. Landing page playbooks are now their own type of playbook!
Like DriftLinks, Conversational Landing Pages (CLPs) have specific URL triggers which are simple to fire and safe for testing when you're not ready to go live yet.
CLPs are focused landing pages that are meant to drive conversations with Leads who are interested in completing a single Call To Action, whether that be a webinar sign up, event registration, demo request, or content download. Because of this simple and focused format, Conversational Landing Pages are also ideal for testing.
Specifically, CLPs are great for
- testing without installing any code!
- stripping down the bot to just the messaging
- letting yourself focus on surfacing typos, awkward transitions between messages, and logical flow of the conversation itself
- not just testing! As stated before, a lot of customers use CLPs as actual branded landing pages for certain events and campaigns targeted at a specific customer base, where they really want a full-screen takeover to engage their leads.
OK, but how does this look?
Click Turn on to enable the landing page from any existing Bot Playbook you have.
Note:
If you see a "Test" tab instead of "Landing Page", your Playbook was created after we made Landing Pages their own Playbook type. The "Test" tab works in the same way!
For existing Bot Playbooks, the on/off status of a landing page is completely separate from the on/off status of your Playbook. This is because you may want to use a landing page, but not have the bot Playbook show up on your actual site!
For a more exhaustive doc on Conversational Landing Pages using the features and customization listed in the image below, check out this article!
Testing with Integrations
The following pieces of data will not sync to an outside MAP or CRM integration while testing your bot playbooks:
- Salesforce - Meeting booked with Drift events
- Salesforce - Drift Conversation Custom Object records
Article Details
Last Modified By
Nicolas Brown, 9/10/2024 6:16 PM
Title
Drift - How to Test a Bot Playbook
URL Name
How-to-Test-a-Bot-Playbook
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Drift - How to Test a Bot Playbook