Changes to Google Optimize

If you’re working hard to get the best efficiency that you can out of your marketing activity, you’ll be constantly tweaking and testing all aspects of your customer journey through the funnel to offer the best experience you can.

Part of that optimisation process includes copy and design changes on landing pages to test the effect on the user action. That could include testing different imagery, headings, or call to action placement and design. Often, those changes are made to the live versions of your site – if you see an improvement you’ll keep the changes, and if not you’ll revert or try something else. This is time consuming, error-prone and tedious.

There are plenty of options out there for testing variations of pages against one another. A simple one we’ve used a lot at The Marketing Eye is Instapage, for instance. Back in May, though, Google launched “Optimize” – a free tool to set up tests on your site.

The process to get setup takes around 10 minutes:

1. Sign up at google.com/optimize
2. Link your Analytics account
3. Add a snippet of code to the template of your site

Once that’s done, you can set up variants of any page by editing layouts in Google’s own editor. Optimize will then serve up your variants to your audience without them ever knowing they’re part of a test, and give you the data you need to make good decisions. 

Recently the Google Optimize team have released some updates to the tool. First off, they’ve added an AdWords integration, so that you have the power to test variations in AdWords landing page as effortlessly as you test variations in ad copy. Simply enable Google Optimize within the “Linked Accounts” section of AdWords to unlock the feature in Optimize. 

The second change is the expansion of the Objectives section of a test. Previously Optimize users were expected to set up a goal specific to their test within Analytics. Now you are able to build a new Objective directly within Optimize, with the double impact of both reducing setup time and not eating into your 20 goals per view for those of you who run large numbers of tests.

Get in touch to learn more about Google Optimize, or for further information about setting up A/B tests.