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Tag: Content Experiments

  • Google Talks Advanced Content Experiments In Google Analytics

    Google has been releasing some half-hour educational videos for marketers to get more out of Google Analytics. Earlier, we shared one specifically for Mobile App Analytics with Android.

    Here’s another one about content experiments.

    In the video, Google Analytics advocate Pete Frisella talks about various advanced implementations of Content Experiemnts.

    Google has been making quite a few changes to Google Analytics lately. You can see some of the most recent ones here. For more educational resources related to Google Analytics, check out the recently launched Analytics Academy.

    More on content experiments, which replaced Website Optimizer last year, here. They launched an API for it this past June.

  • Google Analytics Gets Content Experiments API

    Google announced today that is launching a Content Experiments API for Google Analytics. This is a tool developers can use to test site content with programmatic optimization, and turn Google Analytics into an A/B testing platform.

    “By utilizing our multi-armed bandit approach, you can maximize results by efficiently determining which assets on your site perform best to offer an improved experience for users,” says Russell Ketchum from Google’s Analytics team. “Multi-armed bandit experiments are powerful and efficient tools and with the new Content Experiments API, you can get even more from them.”

    “The Content Experiments API allows you to pick and choose from all the testing functionality Google Analytics has to offer and to combine it into powerful solutions that best fit your particular needs,” adds Ketchum.

    This includes testing changes to content without redirects, testing items sever-side (like the result set of a database query), testing with your own variation selection logic and using Google Analytics for reporting, and testing in non-web environments using measurement protocol.

    You can find documentation for the API here.

    Google launched Content Experiments in Google Analytics about a year ago, replacing Google Website Optimizer.

  • Check Out These Changes To Content Experiments In Google Analytics

    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.

    Copy experiment

    “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.

  • Google Website Optimizer Problems Fixed

    Google Website Optimizer Problems Fixed

    Some users of Google Website Optimizer have been experiencing some problems with the service. It appears Google has heard the complaints, and fixed the issues accordingly.

    In a post to Google’s Website Optimizer blog, Google Analytics Sr. Product Manager Enrique Muñoz Torres writes:

    We have gotten reports of spurious conversions appearing in Website Optimizer reports over the last few days. We have since fixed the underlying problem and reprocessed the affected data. Please do let us know if you still see any problems with the numbers in your reports. We apologize for the inconvenience.

    Of course Website Optimizer will soon be going away. A week ago, Google announced the launch of Content Experiments in Google Analytics. This will let webmasters test different versions of pages right from Google Analytics itself, eliminating the need for a standalone product in Website Optimizer.

    Google says Website Optimzer will be going away on August 1.