An Introduction to The Optiverse

The “Optiverse” exists as a resource for the community to post and discuss quirks and questions about their Optimizely experiences and this, in a nutshell, describes what this brand new series of blog posts throughout 2016 will be about – cherry-picking the most interesting and relevant topics to help you use the tool effectively and ultimately, run awesome A/B and multivariate tests.

An Introduction to The "Optiverse"

As Solutions Partners of the A/B and Multivariate testing tool, Optimizely, we love hearing about Product Updates, News and recent Case Studies from our friends over at the Optiverse. So when this wonderful corner of the Internet went through an extreme makeover (their words, not mine) at the start of the year, inevitably we got a little bit excited.

Much like the actual universe, The Optiverse is constantly expanding and you probably won't have time to explore it all, so due to popular internal demand we have decided to make these posts available to all! Some posts, like this one, will have a central focus in one or two areas, while others will cover a broader spectrum of topics.

So to kick things off with a (big) bang...

What's New

As mentioned above, the Optiverse just got an extreme makeover. And isn’t it (he/she?) beautiful. With this came a number of practical enhancements, including:

- A new left-nav sidebar and new central page to see Community, Knowledge Base and Academy updates. New, fresh content should appear here and over time it will be personalised to your browsing habits, too.

- The Academy section has been reworked to be more interactive and guided... Find here new courses such as Fundamentals of Web A/B Testing, Platform Certification Study Guide, quizzes, and so on.

- Improved search feature so you can filter on various sections of the site.*yes*

- Interested in web design? Take a look at this post that explains brilliantly why and how Optimizely chose to do this, through a combination of data-driven design and A/B testing! Perfect with a hot brew.

2016 Testing Toolkit

Based on user feedback a “2016 Testing Toolkit” has just been released to the community:

- Presented across ten different subject areas, the toolkit is designed to help businesses and optimisation professionals implement and grow A/B testing / CRO programs, and scale the impact of A/B and multivariate testing.

- Includes various frameworks for testing, template Word documents / Powerpoint presentations, infographics and more.

- Annoyingly but by nature these are all different file types so I can’t share them together with you here and now...but if you think this would benefit you or your business, visit the Optiverse and download the various resources; they’re all free.

- To give you a sample, take a look below at a snippet from Part 3 – the Test Idea Worksheet.

- Here’s to a more productive 2016!

PayGo

Optimizely currently offer an experimental Pay As You Go plan “PayGo” in the US, which allows you to set a monthly testing budget on a renewable (monthly) basis. The news here (for our UK readers) is that they are planning on introducing this into the UK market during 2016, more details here.

- The ability to increase or decrease a monthly testing budget via the Accounts Settings page, allows for increased flexibility for testing in Optimizely.

- Though there is currently not a huge amount of information to go on at this stage, we will certainly be keeping an eye on how things develop.

- There has been some demand for the plan to offer enhanced support on more complex issues, custom code, etc. and this may be built into the UK offering. Again we will be monitoring how this develops.

Integrating with Hot Jar

Optimizely are also currently working on a Hot Jar integration, though as far as we know a release date has yet to be set.

- This is certain to warm the hearts of anyone that uses both platforms and would like to see a native integration between the two platforms.

- Hot Jar is a nifty CRO tool (and reasonably priced, too) that lets you track and visualise how users are behaving on your website, for example by setting up Heatmaps, Funnels, or Surveys. Discovered in GA that you have a high funnel abandonment rate? You can also analyse your forms to expose these “pain points”.

- In the meantime, with a little custom code there is a workaround that you can use to tag your Hot Jar recordings with your Optimizely experiments and create an integration this way - check it out here.

And that’s about it for January..

Thanks for reading. Next month will have more of a practical orientation when I’ll share what we’ve been up to, along with a load of useful Optimizely Tips & Tricks, Problems & Solutions.

Inspired? While you wait for next month’s post to come around, get stuck into Optimizely’s Testing Ideas & Successes section for loads of ideas for A/B tests and case studies.

If starting, or doing more, website testing and personalisation is on your 2016 to-do list and you’re looking for expert support, give us a shout! There’s nothing we like more than using data to drive improvements!

To view this blog written by Chris Woods on Periscopix's website, please click here.