Measuring Beyond Conversions: New Features in Optimizely X

As teams increasingly try to bring customer data and insights into their day-to-day work, it’s not enough to just have access to the right data—you also need to be able to take action on those insights.

More and more, we’re observing a change in how companies are experimenting to drive business decisions. In addition to optimizing key customer acquisition funnels or marketing webpages, organizations are experimenting to improve product performance, feature adoption, and customer engagement across a proliferating number of digital channels.

We’ve heard feedback from our customers that they need to demonstrate the impact of experiments with deeper insights and more robust tracking and reporting, enabling them to involve diverse teams and roles into a practice and culture of experimentation.

That’s why we’ve added the following new capabilities to Optimizely X: more flexible metrics, Metrics Builder, a rebuilt Data Export, Event API and features like export to CSV.

More flexible metric types

We’ve introduced new metric types in Optimizely for measuring non-conversion events, which span a broad range of use cases across industries.

Why is this page’s scroll depth low? Will this shipping promotion encourage visitors to add a higher number of items to their cart? Can we offer a different product to capture applications for loans with a higher average credit score?

These are all questions that can now be answered with experimentation in Optimizely. You can now attach any value to an event tracked in Optimizely, using them to generate key ‘secondary’ performance metrics for values such as page scroll depth, video consumption, number of content downloads, and unique pages per visit.

Industry-specific metrics such as ad viewability for media, lead form fills for B2B or ancillary travel purchases are high-value behavioral cues that can now be measured as part of experiments and personalization campaigns in Optimizely.

These new metric types will be available for customers in the coming weeks.

Metrics Builder

Metrics Builder is Optimizely’s new natural language interface for metric setup and configuration which streamlines the task of adding metrics to your experiments and campaigns. With Metrics Builder, Optimizely X users can now easily create and modify metrics to determine an experiment’s effect on conversions, numeric values and revenue by unique visitor or a specific conversion event, such as purchases. Metrics can also be measured in a negative direction, which can help with scenarios like performance, where a reduction in page load time is a positive outcome.

Learn more about how to set up metrics in Optimizely X.

Rebuilt Data Export, Event API, and more

We have rebuilt our Data Export and Event API capabilities to be more performant and to enable measurement of more complex use cases, like tracking offline conversions or user behavior in more secure environments. In addition, we’ve introduced simple yet important changes like the ability to export to CSV. These improvements will enable larger organizations to more effectively experiment at scale.