Google Optimize now offers more precision and control for marketers

Savvy businesses review every step of the customer journey to ensure they are delivering the best experience and to find ways to offer more value. Today, we’re releasing two new features that will make it easier for you to improve each of those steps with the help of Google Optimize and Optimize 360. 

AdWords integration: Find the best landing page 

Marketers spend a lot of time optimizing their Search Ads to find the right message that brings the most customers to their site. But that's just half the equation: Sales also depend on what happens once people reach the site.

The Optimize and AdWords integration we announced in May gives marketers an easy way to change and test the landing pages related to their AdWords ads. This integration is now available in beta for anyone to try. If you’re already an Optimize user, just enable Google Optimize account linking in your AdWords account. (See the instructions in step 2 of our Help Center article.) Then you can create your first landing page test in minutes.

Suppose you want to improve your flower shop's sales for the keyword “holiday bouquets.” You might use the Optimize visual editor to create two different options for the hero spot on your landing page: a photo of a holiday dinner table centerpiece versus a banner reading "Save 20% on holiday bouquets." And then you can use Optimize to target your experiment to only show to users who visit your site after searching for “holiday bouquets.”

If the version with the photo performs better, you can test it with other AdWords keywords and campaigns, or try an alternate photo of guests arriving with a bouquet of flowers.

Objectives: More flexibility and control 

Since we released Optimize and Optimize 360, users have been asking us for a way to set more Google Analytics metrics as experiment objectives. Previously,
Optimize users could only select the default experiment objectives built into Optimize (like page views, session duration, or bounces), or select a goal they had already created in Analytics.

With today's launch, Optimize users no longer need to pre-create a goal in Analytics, they can create the experiment objective right in Optimize: 

 

When users build their own objective directly in Optimize, we’ll automatically help them check to see if what they’ve set up is correct.

Plus, users can also set their Optimize experiment to track against things like Event Category or Page URL.

Learn more about Optimize experiment objectives here.

Why do these things matter? 

It's always good to put more options and control into the hands of our users. A recent study showed that marketing leaders – those who significantly exceeded their top business goal in 2016 – are 1.5X as likely to say that their organizations currently have a clear understanding of their customers' journeys across channels and devices.¹ Testing and experimenting is one way to better understand and improve customer journeys, and that's what Optimize can help you do best.

>>> Check out these new features in Optimize now<<<

^{1. Econsultancy and Google, "The Customer Experience is Written in Data", May 2017, U.S.}