Every user is unique and your website should address their individual tastes. Optimize enables you to run website experiments to determine the optimal experience for each group of users.
In this article:What is Optimize?
Optimize allows you to test variants of web pages and see how they perform against an objective that you specify. Optimize monitors the results of your experiment and tells you which variant is the leader. To get started:
Example
If your goal is to get visitors to sign up for a sales demo, you can experiment with changing your call to action, hero image, navigation bar or button color.
Benefits of testing
By running experiments in Optimize, you can test new website designs, layouts and content with a subset of your visitors. Instead of relying on instinct and opinion to determine the best page or site design, you can run an experiment that tests alternate designs with real-world users and get results that are simple to read and understand. Optimize uses the power of Analytics to measure your experiments and leverage your Analytics conversions as experiment objectives. What's more, you can serve experiments to specific groups of users that you've defined as Audiences in Analytics.
Who should test
Anyone who creates content or designs website experiences can benefit from testing. Marketers can run experiments on landing pages to increase conversions, publishers can test how different site layouts affect stickiness, social media managers can experiment with different sharing strategies, and designers can test new website designs.
Experiment types
You can run several types of experiments.
A/B tests
An A/B test, sometimes called an A/B test, is a randomized experiment using two or more variants of the same web page (A and B). Variant A is the original. Variants B through n each contain at least one element that is modified from the original, for example, a different colored call-to-action button. In some experiments, variant B may be a completely different version of a web page.
Redirect tests
A redirect test, (a.k.a. split URL test), is a type of A/B test that allows you to test separate web pages against each other. In redirect tests, variants are identified by URL or path instead of an element(s) on the page. Redirect tests are useful when you want to test two very different landing pages, or a complete redesign of a page.
Multivariate tests (MVT)
A multivariate test (MVT) tests variants of two or more elements simultaneously to see which combination creates the best outcome. Instead of showing which page variant is most effective (as in an A/B test), MVT identifies the most effective variant of each element as well as analyzing the interactions between those elements.
Learn more about A/B, redirect, and multivariate tests (MVTs).