Set up mutually exclusive experiments

If you run several experiments at once, you may sometimes want to keep users who are included in one experiment from being exposed to a second, related experiment at the same time. Perhaps these experiments are working on solving the same problem in different ways, and you worry that your users will be confused if they’re exposed to both, or that your experiment results might be tainted by the interaction effect. 

Amplitude Experiment makes it easy to set two or more experiments to be mutually exclusive to each other. When you set experiments as mutually exclusive, this means they cannot share any users: users who are shown experiment A will not see experiment B, and vice versa. Simply add both experiments to the same exclusion group, and Amplitude Experiment will take care of the rest.

When should you make experiments mutually exclusive?

Generally, mutually exclusive experiments are recommended in these situations:

• Simultaneous experiments that occur in the same area of your product, and have the same goal.
• Simultaneous experiments that occur in the same funnel, and have the same goal.

Alternatively, you could run these experiments one after the other, instead of simultaneously.

Create an exclusion group

To create an exclusion group and add your experiment to it, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Experiments page and click the Bucketing tab. If you are trying to do this from within an experiment, scroll down to the Mutual Exclusion panel and click Manage exclusion groups.
2. In the Bucketing tab, scroll to the Mutual Exclusion Groups panel. If you need to create a new exclusion group, click + New Exclusion Group and give it a name. If the exclusion group you’re interested in already exists, select it from the list.
   
   
   
   
3. From the Allocation drop-down list, select the experiments you’d like to add to this exclusion group. All experiments in the group will be mutually exclusive from each other.
4. Next, set the traffic allocation percentages for each experiment. This determines how many of your users will be allocated to each experiment in the exclusion group.
5. Click Create to finish the process.