Article

7min read

Maximize the Potential of Experience Optimization Platforms: Key Questions to Ask for Performance Success

In the dynamic realm of e-commerce, selecting the right experience optimization platform (EOP) is essential for achieving success. But, how do you assess the impact on your website performance and unleash its full potential on your site?

We’re here to guide you with key questions to ask experimentation and personalization solutions you’re assessing, specifically designed to help you evaluate performance – so buckle up and continue reading to unlock new levels of success!

Bonus audio resource: Curious to know more about what AB Tasty does to address performance and optimize customer experience? Listen to this insightful discussion between Léo, one of our product managers, and Margaret, our product marketing manager. In this chat, Léo explains what AB Tasty specifically does to improve performance for our customers. Want to know even more? Check out Léo’s in-depth blog post.

#1: Does the platform offer 99.9% uptime and availability?

Downtime can be a nightmare for your business. Make sure the EOP is known for its reliability and high uptime. Although it might not sound like a big deal, the difference between 99.5% uptime and 99.9% uptime is huge. With 99.9% uptime, you can expect less than 9 hours of downtime annually, vs. 99.5% which can mean nearly 2 full days of downtime in a year. It’s crucial to choose a platform that can keep your website accessible to customers as often as possible, ensuring a seamless shopping experience around the clock and more revenue for your business.

#2. Does the platform prioritize website speed and load time?

It goes without saying that in the fast-paced online world, speed matters. Does the EOP offer features that prioritize website load time? Look for optimization techniques such as caching, image compression and code optimization to ensure quick and smooth page loading. A snappy website keeps customers engaged and drives conversions.

#3. Does the platform provide a comprehensive performance center?

Acting on detailed performance data ensures your website is always giving users the best experience. Does the EOP offer comprehensive insights into reducing the tag or campaign weight for optimal performance and user experience? Your EOP should have a performance center that guides you to campaign optimization, including ways to reduce tag weight, identify heavy or old campaigns you can delete, or targeting verification.

#4. Do the performance metrics they’re showing you come from sites that are active?

Some EOPs might show you performance metrics that include sites that aren’t actually active. An inactive site has a much lighter tag weight than an active site, which makes their performance metrics look much better than they actually are. Always ask the EOP if their metrics are from active sites to ensure you’re seeing the most accurate representation of what you can expect if you go with them.

#5. Are they regularly adding new features to enhance performance?

To stay ahead in the rapidly evolving digital ecosystem, it’s imperative that your EOP consistently adds new features to optimize performance. With regular updates like these, you can ensure you’re meeting user expectations, addressing emerging challenges, enhancing performance metrics, and keeping an edge on the competition.

Take, for example, dynamic imports. Using dynamic imports has a huge advantage. When we were using a monolithic approach, as some EOPs are still doing, removing a semi-colon in one campaign and pushing this change to production meant that all visitors would have to download the full package again, even though only one character over tens of thousands had changed. With dynamic imports, all visitors redownload the new version of the campaign – and that’s it. Simple.

#6. Can the platform handle spikes in web traffic?

E-commerce sites often face surges in traffic during peak periods or promotional events like Black Friday. How does the EOP handle increased web traffic without compromising performance? Look for platforms with content delivery networks (CDNs) that handle load balancing and scalability to ensure your website remains stable and accessible during high-demand periods.

#7. Does the platform have both server-side and client-side offers?

Having both server-side and client-side EOPs is crucial for e-commerce companies, especially given how much e-commerce is happening on mobile and apps. Server-side optimizes performance with zero flicker and seamless mobile experience, while client-side enhances user experience and puts the power of experimentation and personalization into the hands of marketers, freeing up developer time. Utilizing both platforms enables holistic optimization and consistent experiences, drives business growth, and leads to more satisfied customers.

#8. What level of local customer support and documentation does the platform offer?

Technical support and comprehensive documentation are vital for a smooth experience with your platform. What kind of reliable customer support channels does the EOP provide? Look for platforms that offer timely assistance in your locality and language, and extensive documentation, empowering you to resolve issues and make the most of your platform’s features. Review P2P sites like G2 to understand what EOPs consistently offer the best service.

#9. Is the platform scalable and adaptable to future needs?

As your e-commerce business grows, your optimization needs may change. To what degree is the EOP scalable and flexible enough to accommodate future requirements without affecting performance? Does the platform have well-known medium and large client brands with high traffic demands? Choose a platform that can adapt to evolving business goals and easily incorporate new features. This ensures the platform remains aligned with your growing needs.

#10. Can you test out the tag for yourself?

Tags should be easy to implement. You want to make sure that the one you go with is compatible with your system. While industry reports can give you an idea of what you can expect, they aren’t representative of your site. The best way to tell is to test it for yourself on your site. This lets you see if what the EOP says is actually what you get. It can also give you an idea of implementation, use, accuracy, reliability and confidence. Finally, it lets you see if there may be any issues that could arise and gives the EOP a chance to address them immediately.

Evaluate the Performance of EOPs to unlock your potential

By asking these key questions, you can begin to evaluate the performance of experience optimization platforms and ensure you select one that helps you unlock your potential. Focus on uptime, speed, traffic handling, mobile optimization, integration capabilities, support, and scalability – and ensure the EOP has an answer for every one of these questions, with proof to back it up. This way, you’ll be able to make an informed decision and optimize your ecommerce site for a seamless user experience, driving higher conversions and business growth.

Go through the checklist below, whether you have an EOP already in place, or are looking to start your EOP journey, and ask providers what they offer:

☑️ Does the platform offer 99.9% uptime and availability?
☑️ How does the platform prioritize website speed and load time?
☑️ What does the platform’s performance center look like?
☑️ How does the platform handle spikes in traffic?
☑️ Does the platform offer both server-side and client-side optimization?
☑️ Does the platform integrate with the tools and systems that you already use?
☑️ What level of support and documentation does the platform offer?
☑️ Is the platform scalable and adaptable to your future business needs?

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Article

7min read

Four Ways to Use GA4 to Power Your Web Experimentation Programs

We invited Oliver Walker from our partner Hookflash to talk us through the practical ways you can use GA4 with your experimentation. 

Although many people are talking about GA4 as a different platform from the previous version (Universal Analytics), conceptually it lets you do largely the same things. Its primary functions are to help you to understand and optimize your media; to understand and optimize your website; and to understand and segment your website visitors into audiences. However, with GA4 several features can really help you to power an experimentation program.

Here we’ll outline how to use GA4 to its full potential to drive results for your testing program.

Understanding User Behavior

At its core, Google Analytics has always been great for helping website owners to understand their website traffic. Whether it’s where they started their journey or where they ended their digital journey, or whether they sought help halfway through, there are a few options to know about. What we know about GA4 already is that it’s not the most intuitive tool in the world so here are some quick tips on that front:

  • Landing Pages – use Explorations – although there is a default report for landing pages…it’s not the best. Not just because there’s a known bug resulting in an empty row, but also because it doesn’t have the most useful metrics, i.e. bounce rate or engagement rate. If you build a report in Explorations, you can use a different dimension (called “Landing page + query string”) and choose the dimensions you’d find useful:

  • Exit rate – similar to the above, you no longer get Exits (or Exit Rate) in the default Pages & Screens report. Again, rebuilding the report in Explorations gives you both the ability to add Exits as a metric, and you can choose your preferred pages dimension. The default dimension in the Pages and Screens report does not include query strings but if you’d prefer to use the one that does, choose the dimension “Page path + query string”.
  • Site search – and finally, where’s the Site Search report gone!? There’s no longer a default report for this but you can rebuild this in Explorations. You can understand which search terms were most often looked for, by building an Exploration with the dimension of “Search term” and the metric “Event count”.

Understanding User Flow

What Universal Analytics was not particularly good at is visualizing how people traverse through a website. The flow reports were horribly sampled and just merely teased you as to what you could have had. GA4 has on-the-fly path exploration reports that can be used and tweaked, very flexibly. You can find these within Explorations too, just choose Path Exploration and then  tweak, as per the following:

  • Get the pages view – for some unhelpful reason, the default view is Event Name, within each step. In the visualization, click the drop-down underneath Step +1 and change Event Name to be your preferred page dimension to get a view of how users move from page to page.
  • Double-click the page you are interested in to see where users go next. You can also click the +15 more (or whichever number) link at the bottom of each column to get the longer tail
  • Choose a dimension to “breakdown” by lets you easily compare routes through the site for different users, for example mobile vs. desktop or for each of the different browsers. Likewise, you can use segments here to review a certain audience type, e.g. non-UK traffic or Purchasers.

Audience targeting & triggers

Speaking of audiences, this was always a great feature of Universal Analytics and when Google Optimize was in its pomp, the ability to share audiences from UA to Optimize was one of its prime features. With GA4 you get the same ability to build audiences and to share audiences natively with other Google Marketing Platform (GMP) plus some neat additional elements:

  • The ability to use user behavior to trigger new types of goals. For example, if you’re a publisher and you want to engage people to read a certain number of articles in a particular time frame, it’s possible to create an audience for this and then have that set of behavior trigger a new event. It’s called audience triggers. And this becomes a powerful new metric with which to optimize your testing campaigns, by importing that conversion into your chosen testing tool
  • The ability to export audiences from GA4 to other platforms. Namely, this is something that the new Google Analytics Data API supports. This is big news. Whilst it’s to be expected that other platforms will catch-up, at the moment AB Tasty is the only one to have published their mechanism for pulling GA4 audiences into their platform:

This is generally a great leap forward as GA4 also has the concept of users being added, and removed from audience groups, whereas most testing tools don’t have this feature.

Advanced analysis using BigQuery

The final area where GA4 really steps forward beyond its predecessor is that all GA4 accounts have a native integration with Google BigQuery. Whilst the integration itself is free, it’s worth noting that you do incur costs by storing or processing data in BigQuery, although a good partner will be able to advise on what that might look like for you. 

So where does BigQuery help? The data schema provided by integrating GA4 and BigQuery is raw-level data – that means each row is effectively an event, with a time stamp, and all the associated parameters. It lets you have a greater degree of flexibility over what you analyze, provided you’re able to query the data (using SQL, or your friendly AI-driven chat tool.) For example:

  • If you want to understand how long it takes a user to complete a particular flow or set of actions. Worth noting that Google Analytics does batch events so this isn’t perfect, but it is easier than within the interface
  • If you want to look at user flows at an even greater level of detail, for example, how users traverse through the site having landed at a particular page
  • If you want to stitch together any data that GA didn’t capture but that also exists in Google Cloud, e.g. following a lead to submission through to outcome.
  • If you want to conduct a deeper analysis within your post-experiment analyses. All testing platforms will pass events and parameters to denote whether a user was part of an experiment and the variation they saw, so GA4 is a powerful additional tool to deep-dive into results

It’s not all doom and gloom

Yup, GA4 does have some limitations, it’s a big change to a tool that lots of people loved and it’s hard to pick-up. BUT when you start to understand certain concepts and familiarize yourself with capabilities, there are lots of features to help you with your experimentation program.