5 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Optimizely

Optimizely aids website developers in creating and managing A/B experiments. This is done to validate efforts at conversion rate optimization. In addition to offering web content management and digital commerce, Optimizely also offers feature toggles, website personalization, A/B testing, and multivariate testing tools. There are so many tips and tricks to help you run your Optimizely experiments faster, with fewer errors. Here we have created a list of 5 things you didn’t know you could do with Optimizely.

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Fire Optimizely When You Need/Want To

Ideally, a lot of people would like to be able to tell Optimizely when to start the experiment code. You’re in luck, as in today’s world you can now do that with Optimizely.

You can use Optimizely to make JavaScript execute before the rest of the page and before the experiment starts running. A great deal of power is given to you by this flexibility, which enables you to set up any variables, functions, or JavaScript modules before the rest of your experiment and page routines begin to run. By using this feature, you can confidently know that you won’t encounter a race condition where your Optimizely code is firing before any crucial setup has taken place on the page, for instance, if you want to test a specific feature on a page that requires a tweak to a global variable or plugin configuration, such as changing a variable flag for a feature or adding a modal configuration.

Implement Experiment “Inception”

Although this may seem counterintuitive one way you can start an experiment with Optmizely is via another experiment. This can come in handy and work in many different circumstances.

If you do not have access to a website codebase, in this circumstance starting your experiment with Optimizely via another experiment would work. In this instance you may need to limit an experiment to a certain group of conditions, this may be in relation to precise click events. For example, you could trigger an event after a user updates the number of items in their basket, this is a great use case for this, especially if you are not able to add the trigger to the original JavaSctript event.

Use the API to Show Experiment Stats Within Your Dashboards

Using Optimizely API will allow you to display experiment data and your results directly within the dashboard. Having this feature and integration will allow you and other stakeholders that are able to use the dashboard a more focused look at your experiments. This will also help improve the clarity, making it easier to see how your experiments affect different metrics across your website. Meaning you do not have to compare the metrics manually from a number of different sources. Overall, having richer metrics and a fuller dashboard should help you make better business decisions.

Integrate With Heatmaps

Heatmaps are used to sit between quantitive and qualitative testing, making them a handy tool. You can take advantage of heatmaps within your tests, as this will be able to give visuals on users’ shopping behaviours and browsing preferences.

Integrating heatmaps can allow you to:

See how many clicks your new photography assets are getting versus their controls
Evaluate the relationship between clicks on descriptive product text
Show where to click activity is happening within your connect flow

Vanquish Page Flicker

Optimizely works to load your page as quickly as possible. However, it is your job to keep to support your experiments with the aim to avoid the dreaded page flash, where you could find old and incorrect content. Here are the steps you can take to eliminate that flicker:

Step 1: Make sure that any experiments that you have abandoned are properly archived, the main aim is to get right of as much as possible, as this can affect the loadings times of the experiments you do care about.

Step 2: Have a clean-up. Get rid of any codes that may be duplicated or any that are unused, to do this you need to have access to the code editor for each version.

Step 3: Try and add as many of the test functions to the website directly, through your website’s CSS and JavaScritp flies. This will allow Optimizely snippet to gain a lighter lifting job, which can come with many more benefits.

Optimizely Summary

Optimizely is a very powerful platform, where you have the option to tweak many things, as well as giving you access to a wide range of tools for you to use. Sometimes this can be overwhelming, Ultimedia is a go-to Optimizely partner for any ambitious brands looking to reach their digital goals. There are many benefits from working with an Optimizely partner such as expert knowledge, innovative ideas and accelerated growth and ROI.