• Mutually exclusive experiments — Run multiple experiments at the same time on a website without interaction effects. As a result, organizations can dramatically achieve more in a given time period and see results from each experiment without having to wait for each prior experiment to complete. Marketers and business users can build mutually exclusive experiments on their own using a visual, intuitive interface which does not require custom code or developer support.
• Custom snippets — To run an experiment in Optimizely Web, customers include a single line of code, the Optimizely snippet, inside the tags on any pages where your experiment will run. Now, customers can customize their Optimizely snippets for greater flexibility and control across projects and teams. Customers can now break snippets down into smaller pieces, which can help to improve site performance, or combine their projects within the same snippet to enable multiple teams to experiment on the same page at the same time.
• Change history — Access detailed change history for your web experiments and personalization campaigns, so that you can collaborate with confidence. With change history, customers can keep a detailed record of all of their collaborators’ updates to launch experiments with greater confidence and security.

While Optimizely has bought other startups before, today is the first time it’s acquiring a startup built on Optimizely’s developer platform — namely, Experiment Engine.

Experiment Engine describes itself as “the most comprehensive, easy-to-use conversion optimization platform,” which might make it sound similar to Optimizely itself. But the startup has actually built collaboration and project management tools to support Optimizely’s core features (which allow marketers and developers to test out different variations in a website or app).

Those are the kinds of tools that larger companies need if they want to run “tens of thousands of experiments a year” — something that became apparent as Optimizely worked with Experiment Engine to serve some of their shared customers.

Good Split Tests Are

• Scientific: The test comes from a hypothesis or theory about how your customers react to your site. It uses real data. 
• Statistically significant: Run the test on enough users that you can see a statistically significant difference between the two examples. 
• Analytical: Collect enough data to analyze what works and what doesn’t. 
• Reproducible: If you saw the needle move once with a set of customers, it should move again in a similar fashion with another set of customers.
• Iterative: Once your team sees a significant change in customer engagement, you can restart your test with a new change.

Babak Pahlavan, Senior Director of Measurement and Analytics of Google announced Google Optimize during the SMX keynote. This free version of Google’s Optimize 360 will come in October this year and will roll out globally before the end of the year.


Pahlavan shared that this free web and mobile-web testing and personalization tool helps businesses improve their customer experiences and business metrics is connected to Google Analytics and all it’s audience segments as well with the new session quality score.

Optimizely, a startup known for its cloud-based A/B testing service for web and mobile apps, announced today that it’s laying off 40 people, which equates to 10 percent of its approximately 400 employees. The cuts are hitting all departments of the startup.

The startup has picked up more than $146 million in investments — including last year’s $58 million round — from top-tier venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark Capital.

This is just the most recent startup to lay off employees. Others that have recently reduced staff include Instacart, Mixpanel, and Zenefits. This week Sonos said it was laying off employees, as well.

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