Google Optimize is sunsetting: How will this impact your data analytics?

What’s happening with Google Optimize? 

In case you haven’t heard, Google Optimize and Optimize 360 will officially sunset on September 30, 2023. Google says they are 'investing in third-party A/B testing integrations for Google Analytics 4' and will support more A/B testing integrations in Google Analytics 4 going forward. Both Optimize and Optimize 360 have been operating as experimentation solutions which allowed businesses to run A/B testing variations on web pages and compare their performance metrics to drive conversions.

Analytics + Experimentation: Why does it matter?

Businesses that implement conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies expect a return of increased growth and revenue. Some outcomes include higher web traffic, lower customer acquisition costs, better user experience, and increased retention. SaaS companies are often looking for more people to sign up for trials or increase usage of product features. eCommerce companies might be looking to encourage repeat purchases and complete the checkout process, while FinTech companies are looking to simplify the user experience - whether it’s changing coverage or completing the application process. 

When considering CRO goals, it’s important to plan ahead and identify where you might be missing the most opportunities. In order to successfully do this, organizations need the right tools and data. Knowing where to start with your experiments can be daunting, and if you have incomplete data or aren’t tracking the right events, you’re already behind your competitors. In a rapidly changing world, organizations can’t afford to risk their time on business strategies that won’t make the highest impact.

Getting more with your data 

As user journeys become more complex, your product and marketing teams need to be prepared. With Google Analytics 4, users have access to codeless tracking, which captures a very limited subset of events. This means, if you didn’t decide it was important at the time of implementation and set up that tracking, you won’t have those retroactive insights to look back on later. Additionally, you risk the quality of targeting the right behavioral segments, and as a result, your hypotheses will be based on incomplete data and experiments you run may be skewed or counterproductive.

With Heap, users can seamlessly access data though our autocapture capabilities, while our data science layer surfaces them for you, giving you a complete behavioral dataset. If you decide to track certain behaviors months or years later, you’ll have instant access to those insights without the need for multiple tools (GA4 and Google Tag Manager) or any manual tracking. You’ll have more accurate segments to work with, leading to better A/B testing and personalization. 

With Optimize, the good news is that most of your existing containers can be synced to any GA4 property. However, there are some experiment limits for current GA3 users that will now change with the migration. GA4 users must upgrade their account to leverage potential higher limits and additional features. There are enterprise experimentation tools like Optimizely, which allow for both web and product variation testing, along with personalization modules, integrations that integrate with more than just the Google stack, and lightning fast experiment load times, all on one single platform.

Heap + Optimizely 

Together, Heap + Optimizely provide users with a fully integrated, complete behavioral data set and robust experimentation capabilities, helping organizations increase their conversion rates and improve customer experiences. 

Digital teams can leverage Optimizely’s advanced personalization tools, real-time reporting, and flexible experimentation features to get a clear view of which experiments are delivering the best results. Plus, with Heap’s newly released features like Journeys and Session Replay, users can get access to quantitative and qualitative data natively on one platform, helping businesses take their experiments one step further. 

Send Optimizely data to Heap and analyze what steps users are taking and how they’re converting. Use Heap Journeys to get a visual map of the paths users take through your product, letting our data science guide you through each workflow to get a clear view of key user actions. Then, use Session Replay to watch back any moments of friction that might be preventing users from converting and leverage those insights to identify where to focus your next experiment.  

For a limited time, Heap and Optimizely are offering special packages to help ease your migration off of GA4 and Optimize. 

See the Heap Migration Package and Optimizely Special Discount.