In September 2023, Google Optimize and Optimize 360 Will Reach Their End-of-Life
For businesses using the product for conversion rate optimization (CRO) and experimentation, this announcement may come as a shock. However, it’s important to understand why Google is sunsetting its product and what alternatives are available to ensure businesses can continue to experiment and optimize their digital products.
Key Takeaways
- Google Optimize and Optimize 360 will reach their end-of-life in September 2023.
- Experimentation should be core to your product strategy.
- Optimizely is the recommended alternative for businesses serious about experimentation.
- Migrating from Google Optimize to Optimizely requires a well-planned approach.
- To ensure that your business continues to drive growth through experimentation and CRO, it’s essential to migrate from Google Optimize to a suitable alternative.
- Optimizely is the recommended alternative for businesses serious about experimentation, thanks to its fast experimentation platform, best-in-class stats engine, and consistent commendations by leading analysts.
- By taking the time to plan your migration and follow best practices, you’ll be able to continue to experiment and optimize your digital products to deliver value to your customers while increasing your profitability and ROI.
Why is Google Optimize Sunsetting?
In recent years, experimentation has skyrocketed in popularity and an increasing number of firms are now searching for talented individuals to add to their teams. This trend shows no sign of stopping as businesses become continually more creative with experimenting.
With every major decision a business makes, from product development to marketing strategy, experimentation has become an integral part of the process. Companies are now more convinced than ever that testing should be included in their decisions.
As the market has progressed and embraced best-in-class tools to create efficient technology stacks, Google Optimize failed to keep up with leading competitors such as Optimizely in terms of technological capabilities. Particularly when it comes to full-stack experimentation, Google Optimize could not match what these top contenders had on offer.
To support the product roadmap of Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google has instead decided to invest in building integrations with third-party A/B testing platforms and bolster their ecosystem of strategic partners to include Optimizely, VWO, and A/B Tasty.
Google understands that Optimize doesn’t have the sophisticated testing capabilities more tech-savvy organizations require to get maximum value from experimentation. As such, they are integrating APIs between market leaders in experimentation and GA4, a move which allows them to direct their energy towards honing their unbeatable analytics expertise.
Why Experimentation Should be Core to Your Product Strategy
Experimentation plays a critical role in optimizing digital products for the optimal user experience. Here are three reasons why experimentation should be core to your product strategy:
- Create a Best-in-Class Product to Stand Out From Your Competitors: To remain competitive in the digital world, sleek-looking web and app platforms are no longer enough. Users demand a smooth cross-device experience – something only achievable by continuously optimizing features to ensure customers receive products they truly love. Experimenting is essential for understanding what works best and why, as well as how to make them even better over time.
- Increased Profitability, Not Just Revenue: How do optimization strategies transform businesses? At GrahamSEO, we focus on boosting performance and profitability through experimentation and CRO – with the ultimate goal of increasing customer lifetime value. But what does that mean for business success?
- Save on Costs to Drive ROI: By using a test-and-learn process, you can discover which concepts will be the most successful without investing too much of your resources. You won’t need to spend large amounts of money on features that don’t deliver impressive results; instead, you can use smaller-scale experiments in order to quickly identify those campaigns and experiences that resonate with your customers. This way, you’ll save time and energy while still achieving great outcomes!
For example, On The Beach tested whether adding “Our Pick” and “Bestseller” badges would drive bookings and through the process of doing so generated an extra 200 bookings within a two-week period.
Why Optimizely is a Good Migration Choice from Google Optimize
If your business is looking to ramp up its experimentation, we strongly recommend Optimizely. This platform is the quickest and most reliable tool in the market with experiments loading as fast as 50 milliseconds through Performance Edge for maximum speed.
This implies that a variety of tests can be conducted at once without influencing page speed or the user’s experience. With its incomparable statistical engine, you are able to make confident decisions with assurance and data-driven acumen.
Optimizely is consistently commended by leading analysts and was cited by Forrester in the 2023 Total Economic Impact Experimentation report to:
- Increase profits by $9.7 million due to site performance improvements
- Deliver $1.5 million in savings through increased developer productivity
- Drive better decision-making through enhanced trust in data
Google has announced a key integration will launch between GA4 and Optimizely and is recommending Optimizely as an alternative platform.
Migrating from Google Optimize to Optimizely
If you’re currently using Google Optimize and are unsure about how to migrate to Optimizely, here are some steps to help:
- Identify your key experiments in Google Optimize and what data you’ve collected so far.
- Plan your migration by creating a project plan, outlining the migration steps, and defining success criteria.
- Conduct an inventory of the experiments you plan to migrate to determine if they’re technically feasible on Optimizely.
- Prioritize your experiments to determine which experiments you’ll migrate first and which you’ll postpone.
- Set up the Optimizely snippet on your site, install the Optimizely browser extension, and start creating your experiments.
- Test your experiments on a staging site before launching them on your live site.
- Once your experiments are live, track your results and analyze the data to inform future optimization efforts.
Before switching from Google Optimize to Optimizely, it’s vital that you take a comprehensive assessment of your experiments. This way, you can ensure that the migration will not be hindered by certain technical limitations unique to optimizely – as some experiments may not be feasible on this platform.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Google Optimize and Optimize 360 reaching their end-of-life in September 2023 shouldn’t come as a surprise to businesses.
Experimentation has exponentially grown over the last few years, and Google recognizes that its Optimize product does not have the advanced level of functionality in testing that more digitally mature organizations need to deliver business benefits from experimentation.
Experimentation should be core to your product strategy because it allows you to continually optimize your digital products for the optimal user experience, increase profitability as well as revenue, and save on costs to drive ROI.
As an alternative platform, we recommend Optimizely because of its best-in-class stats engine, fast experimentation platform, and consistent commendations by leading analysts.
If you would like my help with the organic SEO side of your marketing, then please just reach out. My team and I are based in Wirral near Chester and Liverpool but we can work with you no matter where you are in the world.
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