Product Releases – Rounding up Q1 2024
At Webtrends Optimize, we are passionate about always improving our product to give the best outcome for our clients and partners.
We continue to invest in the product and release the volume of new features we do because at our core, we are a testing platform. The focus on both our Research and Development tools and new product is how we do better than anyone else. The past year has shown our commitment to strengthening our offering for developers, for analysts, for product teams, and for people managing their testing roadmap. In this blog, we outline the new releases from the last quarter and how they are improving the product, the experience and the outcome for everyone who uses our platform.
New Features
This quarter, we have been working on new features which gives you more power when it comes to testing. We want you to get the most out of your experiments and have the opportunity to utilise as many different features as possible.
VE - Multi Page Testing
To date, we had the ability to run your changes across many pages, with them being selectively rendered only if the appropriate elements were present. We have extended our ability in this direction, now being able to scope specific changes on specific pages. So, you can now change elements in one way for a collection of pages, and in a totally different way for other pages.
Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) controls
Webtrends Optimize now has UI controls, allowing you to toggle between manual traffic allocation between your variants and system-driven suggestions. When manually controlled, you will decide what split to apply to your variations - e.g. 50/50.
When system controlled, i.e. with Multi-Armed Bandit enabled, we will allocate the traffic based on the Change To Beat All calculation for your Key Metric. Future iterations of this will focus on expanding the algorithms available for MAB.
You can select what goal we optimize for. We will ask you to set it if you have not done so, and give you the ability to change it if you'd like to optimize to a different goal over time.
When Multi-Armed Bandit is enabled, you will lose the ability to manually control the traffic split between your variations.
Instead, you will see an output displaying the current configuration:
Over time, you'll find the percentages will separate.
That's it. Turning any AB or ABn experiment into a Multi-Armed Bandit is roughly a 1-button-click action.
You can learn more about how to use Multi-Armed Bandits in our recent blog.
Multi-page Testing in the Visual Editor
Webtrends Optimize now allows you to scope your transformations to pseudo- locations in the Visual Editor.
Previously, you were able to test across multiple pages e.g. "all PDPs" or "sitewide minus checkout” but could not scope particular changes to particular pages. For example, you may want to transform a particular banner on a homepage, and a completely different banner in a different location on PDPs. This release introduces the ability to do this - picking a group of pages to apply your changes to at any given time, and changing this freely as you wish.
Boosted integrations functionality
Integrations are an important part of our offering as we know our clients value being able to get the most out of their data. Most commonly, push integrations are used to send experiment views into Analytics / Insights platforms, such as Web Analytics, Session Recording, Heatmapping, etc., so that you can get further insights about the performance of your experiment from those platforms.
All integrations now come with the ability to:
- Send only once per session.
This feature allows you to send data only once per session per test, thus limiting the calls whilst still maintaining your ability to generate the same reports. This should help save your API call budget on those other platforms.
- Block sending for specific projects.
(Made easy with a simple comment at top of your code)
- Decide whether complete tests should send data or not.
Optimals serve less purpose in being tracked in other platforms, for most customers. Some people like to track data for Completed tests (100%s, optimals), some feel it's not necessary beyond having run the test. The option is there to pick your journey, and send data if you want to, or limit it if you don't. This again should save on your API call budget in those other platforms.
These are all decisions you can make, nothing is forced upon you.
Push Button 3rd Party Integrations
We have bolstered our Integrations library, with push button integrations now available for: Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, GA4 via. GTM, GA4 via. GTAG, Mouseflow, Acoustic Tealeaf and Bloomreach. More integrations will follow in the future, we have plenty planned and ready to build.
Clone into new Project
Cloning is to duplicate an object or make a copy of it. Across the Optimize interface, you'll find instances of Copy / Clone - including when looking at Segments, Tags, Tests and Projects. Cloning tests produces a copy of the experience and places it in the same project. This is particularly helpful for building iterations of experiments, where under no scenario would you want them both to be live and create a poor user experience.
Previously, any clones of a test would belong to the same project. This was great for iterations and ensuring Mutual Exclusions, but less useful if you needed to clone a test and change the Location targeting - for example, adjusting the Location to a different country/domain.
This "Clone into new Project" facilitates this functionality, given Locations are tied to projects. It maintains all of your code, variations, segmentation etc., but builds the test into a new project and so the location can be adjusted independently.
Labels on tests
Finding what you need in our dashboard has been challenging, particularly as you build hundreds of experiences. Filtering by text, test type or state was not sufficient here.
This new feature allows you to add labels to your experiences and also introduces new filtering in the dashboard to navigate these.
Enhancements & Tweaks
Public sharing of reports - shorter URLs
A recent release introduced the ability for users to share their reports publicly - with people who are not users of the Optimize platform or those who do not need to be logged in. This could either be a moment-in-time report with frozen data and filters, or a live view.
One reported piece of feedback was that the generated URLs were too long, and so hard to use on certain browsers especially the more filters/options you specified.
This enhancement drastically reduces the URL length, making these public reports far friendlier to use and less prone to faults when being shared.
Other Tweaks
As always, we've spent some time fixing minor bugs and making performance improvements to ensure as smooth an experience as possible for all our users.
Looking ahead
Looking ahead, features we’ve started working on like Automated Insights, Account-wide programme summaries, more OOTB 3rd party integrations, better alerting of anomalies or key events, etc., all point to testing being the primary thing we care about.
We are committed to being transparent with our clients and partners when it comes to the things we are working on and we look forward to sharing more updates as we continue to make the platform the best it can be.
