Google Optimize is a free tool for creating experiments for conversion rate testing. You set up experiments for various elements on your pages and then Google randomly serves the different versions of your pages to real visitors who come to your website. There are huge advantages to this method of testing over other sites that test your pages with people who may or may not fall into your target market. With Google Optimize, you know that the people who are participating in these tests are your target market (or at least your target visitor).

But, what is A/B Testing?

In web analytics, A/B testing is a way to compare two versions of a single variable typically by testing a subject’s response to variable A against variable B, and determining which of the two variables is more effective.

For a developer, doing A / B testing, consists in creating different variations of the same page/element (2 or more) and making sure that depending on the target, one of the variants is displayed. This, therefore, requires both frontend and backend implementations and you do not always have the knowledge or the time to implement this process.

Why Google Optimize?

It’s a free tool made by Google. Need anything else?

No no ok, I was joking but the real strength of this tool, besides being simple to use and requiring 0.1 programming skills, is the fact that it is created by Google. Google Optimize is integrated with other Google tools like Analytics and Tag Manager. Google Optimize is strongly dependent on the Goals and Audience set in Google Analytics, it won’t work if these are not configured.

Let’s start doing some tests

To do an A/B testing we need a published web application, to speed it up I decided to use another tool from Google that would allow me to put online a test web page, Firebase. For this experiment we will need a simple page with 3 links and our goal will be to optimize clicks on “link 1”.

The web page is online at this link: https://testoptimize-e2c5e.firebaseapp.com

Start with Google Optimize

Google Optimize is part of the Google Analytics Suite, so, to use it we just need to open our Analytics page and click on the Optimize icon and accept the subscription. The first thing we should do within our account will be to create a new “experiment” by entering the name of the experiment, the URL of our site and the type of experiment. There are three types of testing that the tool allows us to perform:

A/B test: Tests two or more variants of a page. Also called an A/B/n test.

Tests two or more variants of a page. Also called an A/B/n test. Multivariate test: Tests variants with two or more different sections.

Tests variants with two or more different sections. Redirect test: Tests separate web pages identified by different URLs or paths.

We will use the A/B test. After creating the experiment we will find ourselves in a screen like this

We are only missing three steps to start our experiment:

Link our analytics property Add the scripts on the HTML page Create the variants of the page

Link Analytics Property

To link the analytics account in addition to pressing the button “connect google analytics” we should create a goal (if we have not already done it) that will be the basis of our A/B Testing. Creating a goal is very simple, just go to administration> select the view > Goal and create a new custom Goal. In this case, we’ll set the Goal to be reached when the event click-link1 is triggered