At the beginning of June, Google announced the launch of Content Experiments in Google Analytics, which would effectively replace Google’s Website Optimizer tool (the tool goes away on August 1).
Since the initial announcement, Google says it has been collecting feedback, and making changes accordingly. One change is support for relative URLs.
“Using relative URLs affords you increased flexibility when defining the location of variations,” says Google Analytics software engineer Inna Weiner. “This is particularly useful if you have experiments running on multiple domains, subdomains, or pages.”
Content Experiments also now provide the ability to copy experiments. There’s a button to do so on the Edit Settings page of the experiment you want to copy.
“If you are running an experiment on a page, this allows you to run additional experiments after the original one finishes without having to add experiment code to your page or otherwise modify it,” says Weiner.
There are also improvements to the experiments report. For example, Google has added regular analytics-report capabilities like Site Usage, Goal Set and Ecommerce tabs, as well as the option to choose variations for plotting on the graph.
Finally, the most significant change, is that Content Experiments are now available to all Google Analytics users. The feature can be found under Experiments in the Content section of Standard Reports.