Yes, both Google Optimize and Optimize 360 will no longer be available after September 30, 2023. 

Until September 30, your experiments and personalizations will continue to run. However, any experiments and personalizations still active on September 30 will end.

Google Optimize (or GO) was launched in June 2011.

In September 2023, GO will no longer be available.

Yes, you can manually add Google Optimize to your WordPress site manually. 

Yes. Shopify approves of A/B testing, meaning it integrates with Google Optimize or Optimize 360.

Today, Google Optimize is session-based. However, this might change in the future when we move to GA4.

Optimize 360 integrates with the detailed customer behavior and segmentation information available in Analytics 360. 

Optimize 360 is useful when you find underperforming pages that need improvement or you want to connect better with your highest-value users.

Yes, via Firebase A/B testing, which is powered by Optimize.

Optimizely supports primary and secondary metrics for experiments to determine success. 

You can also combine data from third-party sources with your Optimizely event data for more accurate targeting and measurement.

According to Enlyft, 154,907 companies now use Google Website Optimizer, mostly in the US and in the Retail industry.

Optimize doesn’t limit the number of experiments you can create for a container that links to a Google Analytics 4 property. You can start up to 1,200 experiments per view. 

According to the latest data from our friends at SpyFu here in 2022, the five domains that invested the most in Google Ads in 2022 are:

1 – Amazon, who spent $22 Million 
2 – Google, who spent $18 Million
3 – Info.com, who spent $16.5 Million
4 – ConsumersAdvocate, who spent $6.35 Million
5 – Expedia spent $5.82 Million

Most accounts will show a score of around 80%, which is a good threshold to work for. 
Anything above 80% might force you to spend more than you’d like on Ads, while lower scores signal the need for adjustments in your Ads.

Most companies optimize their websites to leverage more monetary and operational benefits. 
Some notable examples of such companies include Microsoft, Walmart, Uber, FedEx, Air France, and the National Football League.

Yes.

Optimize measures your results with Google Analytics, so you must link your Analytics account with your Optimize container. 

Some companies avoid Google Analytics because the platform collects and stores personal data, becoming a potential website liability. 

Yes, Google Optimize can now use GA4 audiences. 

It used to be that only Universal Analytics 360 customers had access to GA4 audiences, but in the present, you can use them in your experiments.

Yes, Google Analytics provides great help with SEO through useful nuggets of data.

Yes, Google Optimize is simple to install and use for your experiments.

Limitless. 

You can create as many variants as possible to test against your original content. 

While no A/B testing vendor has been assigned “preferred” status by Google, there are many companies providing tools that can replace Google Optimize, including:

Explore by Omniconvert
Convert Experiences
Zoho PageSense
VWO Testing
Kameleoon
SiteSpec
Adobe Target
Dynamic Yield

The main difference between Google Optimize and Adobe Target is that you can use Adobe to create customized experiences for more than one audience within one Experience (XT) activity. 

Google Optimize, however, only allows one customized experience for the targeted audience.

When it comes to expenses, it’s better to optimize how you spend your budget instead of raising it and spending more money. 

It is estimated that Google Optimize costs around $150,000 per year.

Google Ads offer three different types of audiences you can use:

1. Affinity Audiences – groups of people who have demonstrated a strong interest in a particular topic or product category over a period of time (such as foodies, sports fans, travel enthusiasts, etc.) 
2. Custom Affinity Audiences – custom audience segments based on specific interests and behaviors (for example, a travel agency could create a Custom Affinity Audience based on people who have recently searched for flights to Hawaii)
3. In-Market Audiences – groups of people who have shown recent and active intent to purchase a particular product or service. These audiences are created by analyzing users’ search queries, clicks, and other online behavior.

You can use many tools to improve and simplify your SEO processes. Some of the most appreciated are: Ahrefs, Google Search Console, SEMRush, KWFinder, Moz Pro, Ubersuggest, Answer The Public, and SpyFu.

According to the SEO practices used by SEO professionals, you can categorize SEO in three main categories: 

White-Hat SEO – refers to SEO based on ethical and legitimate techniques to improve a website’s search engine ranking, such as high-quality content, optimizing for keywords, building high-quality backlinks, and following Google’s guidelines.

Black-Hat SEO – in contrast, this refers to unethical and spammy techniques to manipulate a website’s search engine ranking, such as keyword stuffing, hidden text, and buying backlinks. Black-Hat SEO is penalized or even banned from search engines.

Gray-Hat SEO – this type uses techniques that fall somewhere in between, pushing legal and ethical boundaries without crossing them. These techniques include guest posting, link exchanges, and buying expired domains. 

There are four main types of SEO processes, according to your strategy of choice: 

On-page SEO – optimizing individual web pages for specific keywords to improve their search engine ranking by optimizing page titles, meta descriptions, headers, and content to make them more relevant to users’ search queries.

Off-page SEO – building the authority and credibility of a website through external links from other reputable websites, social media shares, and other online mentions.

Local SEO – optimizing a website and its online presence to appear in local search results, including creating a Google My Business profile, building local citations, and targeting location-specific keywords.

Technical SEO – improving a website’s technical performance and structure to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index, including optimizing page speed, implementing schema markup, and improving website security and accessibility.

According to their accuracy as well as the number of people using them, here are the top 3 Search Engines:

1 – Google
2 – Bing
3 – Baidu

While there’s no definitive answer, and there isn’t yet a proven, better Search Engine, Bing’s performance is pretty close to Google’s. 

Bing is installed by default on most Windows and Microsoft devices and uses a powerful algorithm to yield quick and accurate results.

The two types of SEO strategies are content-related and technical.
The first refers to anything on your pages (blog, copy, product copy, links, etc.), while the latter refers to the technical side of the website (page speed, security, flow, etc.)

By far, Google is the strongest search engine existing today. It owns +80% of the market share and captures about 95% of the overall mobile traffic.

There are many beginner SEO tools easy to use and understand. Some of the most popular ones include Panguin Tool, Wordtracker Scout, Lipperhey, Bing Webmaster Tools, Dareboost, KWFinder, and Siteliner.

You can also use the People Also Ask feature that appears in Google’s search results.

No. 

However, the results you’ll get from SEO are highly dependent on your budget and goals.

If you want to avoid Google Drive, you can use Dropbox – the pioneer of cloud storage, recognized as the most popular Google Drive alternative.

No official announcements from Google indicate that they plan to discontinue Google Drive. 

If you’re looking for a faster option, stop at Icedrive, as it’s the fastest online storage solution at the moment. 

The difference between Icedrive and Google Drive isn’t so noticeable, as Google Drive isn’t as far behind, speed-wise.

A safer option for your storage needs is Dropbox, as it uses stronger file encryption for files than Google Drive does. Moreover, with Dropbox, you can also create passwords on individually shared files, and it offers remote device wipe capabilities and two-factor authentication.

Suppose Google Cloud Storage doesn’t suit your needs.

In that case, you can look at some of these other options: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Gen 2), VMware Cloud on AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, or vCloud Air powered by OVH.

Icedrive is a faster solution than Google Drive. 

As for their performance, it depends on your needs. If you need to use the collaboration features or only need to store your photos and videos, Google Drive might be a better option for you.

The equivalent of Google Drive in Microsoft’s world is Microsoft OneDrive. 

While offering the same service, the key differentiator between the two is their approach: Google Drive has a consumer-first focus approach, while OneDrive is mostly focused on attracting enterprise-level users.

If you’re an independent user and you aren’t using the service for heavy-duty storage or large-scale syncing, Google Drive is more suited for you.

However, if you’re an enterprise-level user and the above doesn’t apply to you, Microsoft’s OneDrive will better suit your needs.

While very convenient, Google Drive has some disadvantages, including security risks, limited upload size, and the inability to function properly without an Internet connection.

From a security point of view, Mega comes with a stronger and better encryption method that respects your privacy and enhances security.

While Google Drive is still secure, even without end-to-end encryption, Mega users feel safer about their privacy. 

Google Optimize presents a certain set of disadvantages that sometimes make its usage inconvenient. 

These disadvantages include the lack of ability to use Google Analytics segments (limited to the 360 version), the availability of only 3 success metrics, reporting presents a 6-8 hour delay, and multi-page testing isn’t included in the free plan.

There are certain traps you need to be aware of when developing an SEO process for your website pages, including Website Bloat, Ignoring Search Intent, Publishing Low-Quality Content, Keyword Stuffing Blogs and Webpage Copy, Not Following Best Practices for On-Page SEO, Poor User Experience on the Site, Not Using Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

SEO can become “bad” and get your pages banned from search engines when you use outdated and unethical practices that go against the webmaster’s guidelines.

No, SEO is essential for your website’s visibility and has many revenue-centric advantages. 

However, outdated and unethical SEO tactics can harm your rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

The main SEO issues you might encounter are: Site Isn’t Indexed Correctly. No XML Sitemaps. Missing or Incorrect robot.txt.

One of the most common mistakes you’ll see in SEO practices is neglecting to focus on creating high-quality, relevant, and engaging content. 

Some SEO practitioners focus too much on keyword stuffing, building low-quality backlinks, and other tactics prioritizing search engine rankings over the user experience. 
 
As a result, Google penalizes these pages, rendering all your work useless.

According to Google, here are the five most important aspects to take into consideration when you’re trying to optimize your article for Search Engines:

1. Create a structure for your post
2. Use paragraphs and headings for the readability score
3. Optimize the length of your article to around 2000 words
4. Use related keywords
5. Link to existing content

If you’re looking for SEO improvements that aren’t as technical, you should:

1. Understand your customers and provide relevant content
2. Update your pages often so you’re not offering outdated content
3. Gain referrals from other websites to improve your reputation 
4. Use relevant keywords 
5. Stay up to date with SEO practices and techniques

There are several common SEO mistakes you should avoid. Here are some of the most common mistakes found in a successful SEO strategy: 

1. Keyword stuffing (overusing keywords in content, titles, and descriptions) 
2. Ignoring the user experience (Neglecting to create high-quality, relevant, and engaging content)
3. Ignoring mobile optimization (resulting in poor UX and lower search engine rankings)
4. Building low-quality backlinks (from low-quality or irrelevant sources)
5. Ignoring technical SEO (aspects such as website speed, security, and accessibility)

You can use instructions files such as robot.txt, x-robot-tag, or meta robot to influence the search engine crawling and indexing. Moreover, you can use sitemap.xml to help search engine bots to crawl your website faster.

Google’s Optimize accuracy depends on how the experiments are designed and executed since any A/B testing tool can produce false positives or false negatives if experiments are not designed or executed properly.  

From their side, Google Optimize shows credible intervals for modeled conversion rate and modeled improvement. 

Optimize analysis shows both the 95% and 50% credible intervals. This means that with the outer range (the 95% credible interval), you can say that there’s a 95% probability that the experiment objective is in the credible interval range.

Google Optimize is a free A/B testing and personalization platform, allowing businesses to test different variations of their website and personalize content for different audience segments. 

On the other hand, Google 360 is a suite of enterprise-level tools that includes Google Analytics 360, Google Tag Manager 360, Google Optimize 360, and other products.

No.

Google Optimize works on any browser that supports CSS3 selectors, such as Firefox 3.5 to 60, Safari 3.1 to 11.1, Opera, or Microsoft Edge.

Google Optimize offers free features for basic testing. 

If you’re looking for more advanced testing features, you need to upgrade to the paid version – Optimize 360.

With the free version (Google Optimize), you can run only 5 experiments. If you need more, you need to upgrade to Optimize 360, where you have the ability to run 100+ tests at the same time.

You should always be mindful of your content and avoid publishing low-quality texts on your website. 

By low-quality, we’re referring to AI-generated or plagiarized content, irrelevant copy that doesn’t bring value, or too long or short content (the recommended length is around 2000 words).

Yes, Google penalizes websites if they aren’t optimized for mobile. When your content isn’t mobile responsive, you rank lower on the results page and risk losing 5-30% of leads.

While SEO isn’t inherently bad, it can become problematic when SEO professionals use outdated and unethical practices to rank higher. 

SEO isn’t of much use when you create novelty products or new inventions. The logic is that being a new concept, people aren’t yet searching for it, so SEO isn’t helpful here.

Optimizing a website for search engines is challenging and ongoing. Some of the common mistakes happen when SEO professionals don’t have the patience to reap the rewards of ethical SEO and want to take shortcuts.

 Some of the most common mistakes SEO professionals make include the following:

1. Keyword stuffing
2. Ignoring the importance of user experience
3. Focusing too much on search engine rankings
4. Neglecting technical SEO (issues such as broken links, slow page load times, and non-responsive design)
5. Not optimizing for mobile: With more and more users accessing the internet through mobile devices, ensuring that a website is optimized for mobile devices is essential.
6. Not keeping up with algorithm updates

SEO cannot be ethical or unethical; it’s a simple strategy that allows your content to reach users faster. 

SEO becomes unethical when people involved in it aren’t using the recommended guidelines to increase their search ranks. 

SEO is ethical as long as your content and SEO techniques are user-centric and you provide undeniable value through your articles and website pages.

Optimizing a website is an ongoing process, and you should do it on a regular basis. However, there are several key moments when SEO becomes a priority. Such instances include: 

1. When launching or redesigning a new website
2. When you’re experiencing a decline in traffic or rankings
3. When you’re expanding to new markets or launching new products/services
4. When competitors outperform the website

Yes, website optimization should be a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy. Regularly updating and optimizing your website will improve user engagement, conversions, and the website’s overall success.

Google Optimize allows you to perform free A/B testing and website experiments (some limitations are included in the free version). 

This means you can find revenue-generating variations of your website and improve specific parts without investing in any tool. 

Google Optimize comes with a free and paid option.

The free option, however, only allows for basic A/B testing and experiments. If you’re looking for more advanced CRO tactics, you need to upgrade to Google Optimize 360, the paid version.

It’s generally considered good practice to optimize your apps to improve their performance, the UX, and the app’s overall success. 

However, the approach to App Optimization depends on the app’s platform, your target audience, and the Apps goals. 

Yes. 

Google Optimize deploys Analytics cookies to target users with different content variants. Moreover, Google Optimize also utilizes content experiment cookies to determine the user’s participation in an experiment.

Google Optimize is natively integrated with Google Analytics to help you monitor and understand the results of your experiments.

Google’s CRO tool is Google Optimize. This free version allows you to perform A/B testing, multivariate testing, and redirect tests. 

If you’re looking for a more advanced approach to CRO, you need to upgrade to Optimize 360, the paid CRO tool powered by Google.

Although it seems like Google Analytics is more popular amongst small businesses, companies of all sizes rely on them to collect website and traffic data. 

No. 

Google Optimize is free of cost for its basic features. If you’re looking for more advanced features or fewer limitations, you would have to upgrade to the paid version. 

Google Optimize works on all browsers that support CSS3 selectors, such as Firefox 3.5 to 60, Safari 3.1 to 11.1, Opera, Chrome, or Microsoft Edge.

No. 

Although both offer CRO tools, Google Optimize and Optimizely are different companies offering different products.

Optimizely was acquired by Episerver. 

The first announcement about the acquisition happened on September 3, 2020, and the acquisition was completed on October, 21st 2020.

On January 27, 2021, Episerver announced and then rebranded the whole company as  Optimizely. 

Some of the main competitors of Optimezely are Omniconvert, Adobe, BigCommerce, SAP, Shopify, Salesforce, Unilog, Sitecore, and Oracle.

No.

Optimizely was acquired by Episerver in 2020.

However, Optimezely entered into a strategic partnership with Google Cloud, which required moving their experimentation solutions to it.

Episerver acquired Optimizely in 2020, and on January 27, 2021, they rebranded the company under the name Optimizely.

Optimizely is currently used for its CRO platform by companies such as Uber, Spotify, and Udemy.

The exact amount of money isn’t disclosed. 

However, people involved in the process, who rather remain anonymous, said that Episerver paid less than $600 million for Optimizely.

The exact price depends on the website traffic level. However, for their lowest-tiered plan, you can expect to pay a minimum of $36,000 USD per year, and the price can easily reach $200,000+ per year.

According to its reviews, Optimezely can’t integrate with other platforms, it doesn’t allow multi-project management, and the user interface could be improved.

Optimizely is flexible, serving various audiences; it comes with an intuitive editor and allows you to edit a page to see exactly what the users see, making A/B testing and multivariate experimentation easy.

At the same time, Optimizely is easy to set up and use, and you can easily integrate it into your website. 

Users stated that Optimizely allows for Behavioral Audience Targeting, provides Customizable Platforms, comes with Enterprise-grade Security, and is Mobile Web Compatible.

You can use all the major programming languages (including Android, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript (Browser), JavaScript (Node), PHP, Python, React, Ruby, and Swift) for Optimizely. 

Optimizely comes with two options: Optimizely Web Experimentation and Optimizely Performance Edge.

Optimizely ODP is Optimizely’s Data Platform (ODP), used to store customer data in objects and fields relating to customers’ actions.

Performance testing is limited by network performance and user simulation.

A test limitation is a constraint that doesn’t allow the test to run properly.

While no certain competitor is winning the 1st prize, Google Analytics has some competitors, such as Mixpanel, Heap, Fathom, Plausible, FoxMetrics, GoSquared, Kissmetrics, and Adobe Analytics.

On July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing data, requiring users to switch to Google Analytics 4.

Yes, suppose you don’t want to use Google Analytics. In that case, you can use these alternatives: Hotjar (free forever for up to 35 daily sessions), Matomo On-Premise (free if you host it yourself), and Open Web Analytics (free and open-source).

Amazon has already established itself as the market leader, making up 33% of the world’s public cloud infrastructure, while Google only has 8% of the global cloud infrastructure market share.

Yes.

Google Analytics is still widely used by businesses and website owners to track and analyze website traffic and user behavior. It provides valuable insights into user engagement, demographics, behavior, and acquisition sources, allowing you to optimize your website performance, improve user experience, and increase conversions.

There are four levels of scope in GA: 

1. Product – value is applied to the product for which it has been set (Enhanced eCommerce only).
2. Hit – value is applied to the single hit for which it has been set.
3. Session – value is applied to all hits in a single session.
4. User – value is applied to all hits in current and future sessions until the value changes or the custom dimension is made inactive.

Accuracy. 

Google can’t track everything that happens on a website, so any numbers shown on reports should be treated as approximations.

Microsoft offers a similar tool to Google Analytics, named Microsoft Clarity. 

According to The Washington Post, a new search engine named Omnity targeted at researchers and students is emerging. Some publications are calling it “smarter than Google.”

All metrics you see in Optimize are first processed by Analytics and then pushed to Optimize. 

The push to Optimize can take up to 12 hours. 

As a result, you will generally see more Experiment Users in Analytics than in Optimize.

No. 

Google Analytics is how Optimize measures the experiments, so you must link your Optimize container to an Analytics property to use Google Optimize.

Google Analytics is the best analytics tool for checking website traffic and keyword ranking. 

Real-time traffic monitoring is also one of the best features of this tool. Provides real-time user analytics from specific locations for business websites.

Google Optimize is a web analytics service that allows you to test variants of web pages and see how they perform against an objective that you specify. 

While Google Analytics isn’t 100% accurate, experts say you can find more accuracy in GoSquared. 

GoSquared uses the ‘pinging’ technology to provide calculated time visitors spend on a website and is more accurate than Google Analytics.

Yes, Optimize offers both server-side and JavaScript APIs. 

The Optimize server-side API uses the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol to measure the experiences that you serve. You can also measure AMP experiments with Optimize.

The four core types (or components) in Google Analytics are:

1. Collection through Tracking Code. 
2. Processing users, sessions, and interactions. 
3. Configuration and Filtering. 
4. Reporting Data for Performance.

Google Analytics is now known as Google Analytics 4, or GA4.

According to Google, GA4 is the next generation of Analytics, collecting event-based data from both websites and apps.

While Google Analytics does have reporting capabilities that will help track and measure your SEO efforts, you still need keyword research and the ability to provide quality content to rank high in SERPs.

According to the vendor, Optimizely enables product and marketing professionals to accelerate innovation, lower the risk of new features, and drive up the return on investment from digital by up to 10X.

The vendor states that currently, over 26 of the Fortune 100 companies choose Optimizely to power their global digital experiences, including eBay, FOX, IBM, The New York Times, and many more global enterprises.

To go beyond the basic functionality, you need to upgrade to Optimezely’s add-on, which can add up to over $300,000 yearly.

An additional cost comes with your site’s traffic levels. 

High-traffic sites pay more than low-traffic sites, and Optimizely is one of the more pricey options.

Optimizely’s users also considered the following companies when making the purchasing decision: Adobe, BigCommerce, Omniconvert Explore, SAP, Shopify, Salesforce, Unilog, Sitecore, and Oracle.

If you’re looking for a tool with all of Optimezely’s capabilities but more affordable, check out Omniconvert Explore, Convertize, VWO, or FreshMarketer.

The main difference is in how the tools will calculate the statistical significance in tests, Optimize 360 uses the Bayesian method. In contrast, Optimizely uses a custom frequentist method called Stats Engine.

Another difference is in pricing: Optimizely offers flexible pricing options, while Google Optimize 360 offers per-user pricing.

The main difference is in how the tools will calculate the statistical significance in tests, Optimize 360 uses the Bayesian method. In contrast, Optimizely uses a custom frequentist method called Stats Engine.

Another difference is in pricing: Optimizely offers flexible pricing options, while Google Optimize 360 offers per-user pricing.

Opinions are divided, as users had different experiences with Userbrain. 

Some users reported that Userbrain is fun to use and the payout is worth the effort, while others complained that its low rewards aren’t worth the hassle.

Google Optimize is convenient because it allows users to test variants of web pages and see how they perform against a set objective with the free version. 

However, if you want to do more advanced tests, you need to upgrade to the paid version.

Episerver acquired Optimizely in October 2020.

By January 2021, Episerver rebranded the combined company as “Optimizely.”

Optimized offers unique ML and human expertise to enable users to deliver target content, curated offers, and relevant recommendations.

However, the more features you need from Optimziely, the pricier it becomes.

As with any A/B testing tool, the results aren’t always 100% accurate since they rely heavily on how the test was set up.

However, users and reviewers stated that Google Optimize is “a reliable testing tool” for websites.

As with any A/B testing tool, the results aren’t always 100% accurate since they rely heavily on how the test was set up.

However, users and reviewers stated that Google Optimize is “a reliable testing tool” for websites.

While it depends on target, objective, and budget, you should check your Ads’ performance weekly or, at the very least, bi-weekly.

Google Optimize is free of cost for its basic A/B testing features.