Google Optimize and the 5 Stages of Grief Part 2

Part 2: Denial, Anger, and Needs Assessment

On January 23rd, 2023, Google announced that with a September 30, 2023 end-of-life date, its A/B testing platform Google Optimize will be discontinued. [source]

So, by this time, most Optimize users are through the denial stage. (Read Part 1) If you’ve relied on this tool for your A/B testing, there’s good news and bad. The bad news is the last prolific free testing tool available that’s not supported out of a garage, is going away. The good news is: it was never that good to begin with. Google Optimize is one of the top offenders for adding latency to page load times. It has severe limitations on the number and types of tests and personalizations that can be run, offers no server-side testing at all, and has had no answer for browser privacy changes that impact test data accuracy (ITP, ETP, MSFT Edge Tracking Prevention, and the like). This has resulted in hidden, skewed data related to browser types, new users versus returning, mobile traffic, and attribution.

So, it’s a great time to assess your needs around A/B testing and personalization solutions, and an even better time to be a hero and bring something better to your organization.

At SiteSpect, we’ve consulted with countless organizations to help assess needs around testing programs and their supporting technologies. When assessing your own needs, consider the following:

General Goals

The summary goal of any optimization program and its supporting people, processes, and tools is to drive higher profits, but what are the sub-goals to this end?

• Is your focus on greatly improving the front-end user experience?
• Is your focus to optimize a mobile application?
• Do you wish to frequently iterate on product features and releases, decrease time to market, and reduce the risk associated with that?
• Are you trying to increase revenue with product or content recommendations?
• Does optimization take more time and resources than you think it should to build, launch, and analyze experiments and personalization campaigns?
• What are your specific KPIs? Are you seeking simply to increase conversion, or do your KPIs include increasing average order value, driving brand loyalty, and increasing the use of certain parts of the site?
• Finally, are there things you never even dreamt to ask from an optimization solution because Google Optimize simply didn’t do those things?

Organization & Culture

Every company’s culture, organizational structure, and processes are a bit unique. Examine the following facets of your organization and how your optimization solution aligns and supports them:

• Do you describe your culture as “customer-centric”? Are employees empowered with processes and tools that allow them to deliver on this vision?
• Is Marketing the only team responsible for revenue growth and improving user experience, or are these responsibilities shared across other teams like Development, Product Management, Network Operations, CRO Specialists, or CRO centers of excellence?
• Is your optimization team model distributed or centralized? Is it one person or many?
• Who will be using the optimization solution and what is their skill set? Do you need a solution that can accommodate people who wish to use visual editors and a separate group of users who wish to use APIs and code to run campaigns (client-side and server-side tests in one platform)?
• Do you need to augment your team with certain skills or additional headcount? Could your team benefit from experts who specialize in ideation, results analysis, and program management?

Scalability Needs

• Do you need to optimize different parts of your site?
• Do you need a solution that supports a larger volume of experiments and personalization campaigns than Google Optimize was able to run at one time?
• Do you need a solution that supports your users being part of numerous experiments and personalization campaigns at once?
• Do you care about the speed of your site? Do you think site speed correlates to a positive user experience and higher conversion?

Get past the denial and anger stages of losing Google Optimize. Get on to assessing your needs and evaluating a better solution.

Read on for the next part in our 5 Stages of Grief: Part 3: Denial, Anger, and Needs Assessment.

If you need help considering these assessment points, schedule a time to meet with an experimentation expert: Click Here.