GoolyBib Headquarters – Website Planning Meeting

Your CEO just read news online that Google was going to deprecate Optimize, their A/B testing tool, and is worried: his Q2 plans depend on that tool!

Even if the rumors aren’t true, they’re spreading because there’s something to it
Google hasn’t updated Optimize in years
They won’t offer a free tool forever
So let’s use this as an excuse to migrate off
What can we do to execute our testing plan if 


As the internet marketing world changes, so do the tools and solutions used to optimize websites and campaigns. One of the biggest changes in coming years might be a move away from Google Optimize. Google Optimize has long been the go-to solution for setting up A/B tests and other experiments, and is used on 500,000+ websites. But with Google making changes and discontinuing the service, many are left wondering what to do. 

While Google Optimize might be going away, you can still set up A/B tests and experiments with the same degree of accuracy and ease in another free Google tool - using Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager (GTM) is another free service from Google that allows you to add, update and manage tags on your website. It’s a powerful tool that can be used for a variety of tasks, including setting up A/B tests and experiments. 

So how do you set up an A/B test in Google Tag Manager? Let’s break it down. 

The first step is to create a new tag in GTM. You can do this by clicking the ‘New Tag’ button in the top right corner of the screen. You’ll then be taken to the tag creation page where you can choose the type of tag you want to create. For an A/B test, you’ll want to select the ‘Custom HTML’ tag type.

Once you’ve selected the tag type, you’ll need to enter the code for your A/B test. This is where you’ll use JavaScript to randomize visitors, and then apply filters to conditionally show each version. For example, you could use JavaScript to randomly assign visitors to either the ‘A’ or ‘B’ version of the page. 

You can also use GTM’s built-in variables to create the filters for each version. For example, you could use the ‘Page Path’ variable to filter for visitors on a specific page. Or you could use the ‘Referrer’ variable to filter for visitors from particular sources.

Once you’ve finished creating your A/B test tag, you can then set up triggers to determine when the tag should fire. GTM has a variety of built-in triggers, such as page view, click, form submission, etc. You can also create your own custom triggers if you want to be more specific. 

Once the tag is created and the triggers are set, you can then click the ‘Submit’ button to save your changes. After this, your A/B test will be up and running. The only thing you won’t have is the custom user interface that let you click and edit to make changes to the page, however that was only useful for simple tests anyway.

Test Implementation

0:01 All right. How to ab test when you can't use Google Optimize. So this rumors right now that Google Optimize is going away.
0:09 And that sucks because one of the cool things about it was it was free, easy to use and it let you do interesting stuff.
0:16 The webpages, without knowing how to code luckily you only need to know a very little amount of code in order to replicate it.
0:24 So this is maybe even a good idea to do in general. I found with these ab testing tools, there's like a flicker.
0:32 So when you land on the page, it's like not fast enough. Cause that's to load all of its crazy library, and then it makes the changes.
0:38 So I like to do this anyway. So say you wanted to change this, right? So one of the cool things you could do in Google Optimize and then optimize them for it.
0:49 So you could like click on it in the tool and then change it to whatever you want. You know, growth hackers, whatever, and it would change.
0:58 And then you'd go, great, this is what I want to test. And you'd hit the button. Well, you know, that's not possible anymore.
1:04 And obviously if you do this in the browser and you refresh the page then you know nothing's gonna happen because it's just gonna reload.
1:13 But you can still kind of plan your tests out this way. So if you say you wanted to change the button color you inspect then you can see that this has an idea of intent indicator.
1:26 You can actually click on it and say copy selector, that's useful. And then you can, you know, again, you only need to know a little bit of code if you just type in document and then call it like query sector.
1:47 And then piece that in. Then you, oh, did I do something wrong? Oh, query. Oh yeah, you didn't need this section.
2:00 Oh, here you go. Then you get your button. And you know, here it is. So if you want to kind of change that button, you can actually just make changes directly here.
2:10 So you can say like, what's this, you know, style you background color, color to be like green. Why not? It looks terrible, but there you go.
2:26 If that's what you wanted to do you could also change it and say, I want the text to be free access.
2:34 And maybe that's the ab test that you, you know, your heart desires you wanna run. So stupid example, but like, that's what you want to do, right?
2:42 So how do we actually make this persist? Well, the good thing is we have Google Tag Manager and Google Tag Manager can help us make changes in JavaScripts on our website without needing to deploy anything to our website.
2:55 We don't need to bother developers to do this, and we probably should tell them, right? It's not gonna bother them to tell them that you're changing something.
3:03 It'll bother them a lot actually, if you change things and you don't tell them. So just be careful here. Cool.
3:10 So how do we make this actually run on the website? Well, we can go to tags and we can set up you know some code.
3:22 So you know, you can actually don't even need all this stuff, right? Here's some code I made earlier. You know I, when I'm testing the stuff, I, I like to just go have an alert, which is like, it's loaded, right?
3:37 So you can just see that whether it worked or not pretty easily. So here's the tag, right? And don't worry about the triggers and stuff right now.
3:47 But if, if you wanted to, you can just like save this and then when you hit preview, you go through to your website.
3:56 If you load that page, then when that loads should say, yeah, look, it's loaded, right? And then you know, we've made this change here, the green button.
4:09 Cool. So that's not an AB test, so that's just making a change. But how do we make an AB test?
4:14 So if you look in here, I have the version B, right? What does that mean? So I'm only triggering it based on the version.
4:23 So if we look at this, it says on page views, but not all page views, just some page views. And the only one I find on the version when the page views the version matches, this is using regular expressions.
4:35 Don't worry too much about that slot. And then either slot, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. So if you wanted to do this, you could do something similar.
4:45 You set this up. Now how does it know what this version is, right? Where does that come from? Well that is is just coming from if we go to variables and if we go down to custom variables we made a little custom variable for this.
5:11 So let's just look at here, yeah, version. And this is the code that we use to do this. So we have to randomize the visitors for an AB test, and that's what this part is doing.
5:25 It's giving you a random number times 10 slots. So that's gonna give us, you know, slots zero through nine. And that will assign a random number on every page, you to everyone.
5:38 But then we're not gonna get the same number again. So if I visit another page or if I refresh page, I'm gonna get something different.
5:44 So how do I persist it? Well, that's what the local storage thing is. What that's doing is, is first looking in local storage, which is just in the browser, you know, is there a version for this person and it's you know, gonna get the version and then pass that along.
6:01 And if there isn't a version, then it's gonna create one and then store it in local storage for me. So if we go back to this page, we right click inspect and then we go through the application.
6:15 We can see we are in slot nine. Now what if I change this to slot two? Lemme just refresh the page.
6:24 Ah, not in the test. Cool, let's inspect again and let's change it back to slot nine and then refresh, and then refresh.
6:43 Mess up. Slot nine. Yeah, I think I broke it. Oh, yeah, here we go. <laugh>. So it opened up a different page.
7:00 Yeah. So now I am in the experiment, right? Cool. So that should give you a really good idea of how this works.
7:09 It just randomizes the users, stores it in local storage, and then if they're in slots, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 then you know, you can show them a version.
7:20 And and that's really all you have to do. You can obviously run as many experience as you want, like you could you know instead of having this trigger for version B, right?
7:32 You can actually have you know, a multiple triggers. You can have version A, B, C, D, E, F, G up to 10, you know and and, and then you could run multiple different experiments or like multiple different versions.
7:46 It's really up to you. But hopefully this gives you a good mental model for how that works. The other thing to think about is in terms of tracking you probably want to add, like, you know, add something to your, like if you're doing GA for I am you know, then you probably want to add something.
8:12 I think, oh yeah, no, it's not here. It's user properties, right? And user property. I'm just gonna make this version oh, yeah, sorry, I got this wrong to, oh, what did I do?
8:32 That should be version, sorry. So that's gonna input the value of the version for that user. And then I'm just gonna call this version.
8:44 So it's a property name. And if you do that now when you're in Google Analytics four, you be able to filter down to those users based on their version and then report On it afterwards.
8:56 So you know, this is a simple way to do that in any analytics package. So you know, there's always like a user level property you can set.
9:05 Cool. And that's how you reporting your OB test now. So you can just filter down and say like, people who got to that page and then what version were they in, and then whether they did, you know, any conversions afterwards.
9:16 Cool. Hopefully that was helpful.

Multiple Choice: What does the tutorial describe as a free alternative to Google Optimize for AB testing? 

How can you track the results of an AB test in Google Analytics?

What does the tutorial suggest you do to make sure the changes persist?

What is the purpose of using a random number times 10 slots in the tutorial?

What code do we need in order to make changes to the button?

I’m hearing rumors that Google Optimize is being deprecated (classic Google). If that happens it looks like over half a million websites are going to be without a solution that doesn’t cost $$$ enterprise money. 

Vexpower Learning Certificate of Completion

Congratulations Dr Ravi Prasad 💪