What is Optimizely
Optimizely empowers ASU to enhance its online presence through data-driven experimentation and personalization with a robust suite of tools for A/B testing, multivariate testing and audience targeting.
Key features of Optimizely
- A/B testing: Compare different versions of a webpage, component or experience to understand which performs better.
- Multivariate testing: Test combinations of multiple page elements to understand how different variations affect performance.
- Audience targeting: Define audiences and deliver experiments or experiences to specific groups of users.
- Personalization: Deliver tailored digital experiences based on audience attributes and behaviors.
- Visual Editor: Create and modify simple page variations, including text, images, layouts and styles, without directly changing the underlying website.
- Results and analysis: Measure experiment performance, compare variations and use results to inform future website improvements.
Opal AI
Opal is Optimizely's built-in AI functionality that assists teams throughout the experimentation process. It can help generate experiment ideas, suggest content variations, assist with developing more complex variations and summarize experiment results.
Opal capabilities within Web Experimentation include:
- Idea Builder: Generates potential experiments based on a webpage, goal and supporting information.
- AI Variation Generator: Suggests alternative copy for page content directly within the Visual Editor.
- AI Dev Agent: Helps create more complex experiment variations from natural-language instructions.
- Results Summarization: Creates plain-language summaries of experiment results and identifies potential next steps.
Getting started with experimentation
Before creating an experiment, identify the goal you want to achieve, the page or experience you want to improve and the metric you will use to measure success. Develop a hypothesis that explains the change you want to test and the expected outcome.
Within Optimizely, define the pages where the experiment will run, the events and metrics that will measure success and the audience that should be included.
Use Optimizely's preview tools to review and quality assure variations before launching an experiment. After an experiment is complete, review the results and coordinate with the appropriate web or development team before implementing a winning variation permanently.
Experimentation planning templates
Use these ASU templates to help plan, prioritize and evaluate experimentation and personalization opportunities. The templates provide examples and frameworks that teams can adapt to fit their goals and digital experiences.
- ASU Example Backlog, Prioritization Frameworks, Road map and Personalization Planning — Use this template to organize experiment ideas, prioritize opportunities, develop an experimentation roadmap and plan personalization initiatives.
- ASU Example ROI Model Spreadsheet — Use this template to estimate and communicate the potential value and impact of experimentation opportunities.
Trainings and tutorials
This guide helps new users master Optimizely and Opal AI, progressing from ideation and goal-setting through basic A/B testing to advanced personalization and automated analysis.