#More posts to follow I took a load more screenshots this session

[accumulated-error]

Have you ever seen reality bleed?

Welcome to Pechorsk

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

More than just a game

Warnings: dark elements including noncon and rape, oral, fingering, doxxing, stalking, and other explicit content. 

This is dark!Jake Jensen and explicit. Your media consumption is your own responsibility. Warnings have been given. DO NOT PROCEED if these matters upset you.

Summary: You find a new gaming buddy but he sees you as more than that.

Note: So this is my first Jake Jensen fic and it was lots of fun so let me know what you think and hope you enjoy. :D

Thank you. Love you guys!

As always, if you can, please leave some feedback, like and reblog <3

Special shout-out to @navybrat817​ for helping me with this idea

After too many nights scrolling through subreddits and searching for something to keep you distracted, you decided to bite the hook. Several other redditors agreed to hop on Minecraft and it had been a while since you logged in. You missed the almost relaxing ritual of mining and building.

You joined the chat, quick to hit the little microphone emblem as you listened to the voices in your headset. You learned long ago to keep your mic muted on the servers, especially with strangers. The last time you dared to speak up as a woman in a game chat, your DMs had become so overwhelmed you deleted and started a new account on Discord and changed your ID on Steam.

You were all given your tasks as players called out coordinates and you kept to chopping up the side of a mountain. You mostly worked alone, chatting through text instead of voice chat. As you placed a crafting table in your little mine, another player, JJ-Smooth, popped up and dropped some iron for you. 

He stayed close but you didn’t mind. A lot of players tried to work together the deeper they got and you were used to it. As you uncovered some lava, he dumped water before you could get burned and helped you hack up the obsidian. 

He thanked you on the voice chat but you knew any courtesy in return would earn you the attention of the entire server. So you dropped some gold for him and went on your way.

“I hear a zombie,” he warned.

You turned to hack up the undead before it could get you, only to be shot by a skeleton hidden on the next level. Another appeared and you died before you could hide, the bony villain killed by your ally as you watched your possession scatter over the death screen.

“Hey, I got your stuff,” he said as you loaded back up, “I’ll find you.”

You typed quickly in the chat, ‘sorry, mic busted, give me your coordinates and I’ll come to you.’

You waited as ‘JJ-Smooth is typing…’ appeared at the bottom and finally he sent the numbers. You hopped over the blocky hills and through the forests until you found the mine again. He was just outside and handed over all your tools and ration. He headed back into the mine and you followed him. This time, you began your own path in the opposite direction.

Before you knew it, you’d lost track of time. You sat back as you realised it was only you and JJ on the server. The silence should have tipped you off earlier. He was the host and you felt super awkward for staying so long. You typed that you were logging off for the night and thanked him. 

You hit the keyboard with your knuckle and yawned as you opened the screen, 

“God, it’s late,” you muttered.

“Hello?” he said.

Your eyes rounded as you looked at the mic symbol and the lack of red line made you cringe. You’d hit an extra button without noticing.

“Um, hi, sorry, I just--”

“Mic busted, huh?” he asked.

“No, I--” you didn’t know what to say, “anyways, I should--”

“So, you’re a chick? Is that why you mute?”

“Uh, well, it’s just… easier, sorry, I--” even if you weren’t trying to hide from gamer dudes, you weren’t the best at conversation.

“A gamer girl, nice,” he said and you sighed, “sorry, that sounded weird, didn’t it?”

“Mhmm,” you touched your bottom lip as you cupped your chin, “it’s late, I have to work tomorrow.”

“You comin’ back?” he asked, almost hopeful.

“I don’t know--”

“I won’t tell anyone,” he said abruptly, “promise, lips sealed.”

“I really don’t know if I can do this too much, I usually work early mornings so… yeah,” you said.

“I get it but you know you’re always welcome, hope you don’t mind if I send you an invite now and then. No pressure,” he offered.

“Uh, sure,” you shrugged, “okay, yeah, good night.”

You left the chat quickly and pulled off your headset. Shit.

‘I’m Jake by the way,’ a pm popped up, ‘gg.’

You typed back, ‘gg, it was fun’ and quickly logged out. You sat back and rubbed your eyes. Well, he didn’t seem like a total creep, maybe just a bit awkward but so were you. You shut down for the night and stretched out as you switched off the lamp. You were going to pay for your session in the morning.

🎮

A few nights later you got an invite to the server. You debated it but as it was Friday, you decided to make good use of the PC you’d saved up forever to build. You spawned in the middle of nowhere and built a bed before you found the half-finished settlement. You joined the chat but you must have been early as you were the only one there.

You headed back to the same mine, some work done since the first night, and laid your torches as you ventured into the depths. You jumped in your seat as a voice broke your peace.

“I don’t think anyone else is gonna join,” JJ-Smooth, or Jensen said, “you think maybe you’ll unmute?”

You stopped your mining and stared at the screen. You hovered over the mic button and re-read his name, he was the only other one there. You clicked and gave a strained smile to the screen.

“So, um, what’s the goal tonight?” you asked.

“Get some materials and go back to the settlement, keep building, oh, maybe we could try a portal, you ever gone to the nether?” he said but before you could reply he kept on, “shit, I shouldn’t assume, you seem like an experienced player.”

“Yeah, a few times, but I’m more a casual miner,” you went back to harvesting stone and ore.

“Ah,” he said, and it was silent for a moment, “so, you work again in the morning?”

“Not tomorrow,” you said as you focused on the game, “daycare isn’t open on the weekends.”

“A daycare, huh? That sounds fun, I love kids… not in a weird way but you know, I… urgh, I have a niece,” he said with a nervous chuckle, “nah, that’s cool though, sounds more fun than my gig.”

“Oh?” you turned and kept your axe moving.

“IT. You know, some people would be like ‘hey Jensen, why do you spend all your free time staring at a screen when that’s what you do at work?’” he scoffed, “well, who says I’m not mining there too.”

You wrinkled your forehead and gave a small laugh. He was rambling and it was kinda odd. You were happy for once not to be the strange one.

“But anyway,” he said, “I found lots of diamond over here. If we get some lapis lazuli we can build an enchanting table and get some sick armour.”

“Awesome,” you pressed your fingertips to your lip as you leaned on your elbow, “should try to head back before dark…”

“Hard to tell down here. How about you mine and I’ll keep an eye out for monsters?” he offered.

“Sure,” you agreed as he came onto your screen, “that works.”

🎮

Another week went by and you ventured back into the server a few times but not for very long as late nights did not mix with young children. The next weekend, you joined again on Saturday night and like the last few times it was just you and Jensen. You wondered why no one else was joining when the subreddit was so popular but you didn’t worry about it for long.

You mostly played in silence, Jensen did most of the talking and it was never about anything more than the game or his niece’s last soccer game. That night when you left the game, he kept typing on Discord.

‘I like playing with you,’ his message blipped up.

‘Same, thx.’

‘Really, you’re awesome.’

‘Thx :) Tired, gotta sleep.’

‘Sweet dreams.’

‘Night.’

You changed your status to offline and dragged yourself to bed. You opened your phone as you laid in the dark and went to the subreddit, you scrolled through the builds and screenshots of other people’s catastrophes. 

You came to Jensen’s last invite post from that night but all the comments complained that the world code was incorrect. Hmm, you should tell him next time.

You blackened your cell and plopped it on your night table. You rolled over and buried your face in the pillow, the light still etched into your vision. You fell asleep quickly and woke the next day to another invite from Jensen.

‘How about some Fortnite? If you’re into it?’

‘Srry, can’t, my mom’s expecting me for lunch.’

‘2 bad, maybe later.’

‘Maybe’.

You got ready to go see your mother for your usual Sunday afternoon visit and it went by like any other. When she asked you what you’d been up to, you didn’t mention the gaming, she was never a fan of it. When you got back home, Jensen was messaging you again. You didn’t open the notification and settled in to catch up on some streaming before another week of work.

Monday hit you like a train and you were glad you hadn’t spent the night mining again. If you had, you doubted you’d even be able to open your eyes. You got to the daycare centre and welcomed in the kids. You got them set up for the morning snack then cleaned up as Sandy took them over to the reading circle.

You wiped the tables and then did some painting before you went out for some play time in the yard. As you watched several of the children on the swings, you glanced around. There was a man across the street. You squinted through the chain link as he seemed to be watching but assured yourself it was nothing as he quickly headed for the corner and disappeared.

Inside, the kids were due for quiet time, some napped and those who didn’t, stared at the ceiling and yawned. You could have joined them but knew that wouldn’t be acceptable. The end of the day came and you helped the kids pack up their paintings and their sweaters. You waited in the yard with them as the parents showed up and handed them off one by one.

You waved to Danika as she clung to her mother and your eye was once more drawn beyond the chain link. The same faded grey jacket, the same glasses, and the hat with the frayed brim. It was a better look at the man. Was he looking at you? Why on earth was he hanging around outside a daycare?

“Sandy,” you turned and lowered your voice as she neared, “see that man?”

She peeked over and shrugged, “which one? The guy crossing the street?”

You looked up again and like before, he was walking away casually as if he hadn’t just been staring through the fence. You shook your head and huffed. “Sorry, never mind.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it,” she waved her fingers, “come on, let’s clean up.”

With the kids all sorted out, you went back in and tidied up the last of their mess. You and Sandy were friendly but like with any, you weren’t very talkative. You never really knew what to say but you were never unkind.

You pulled on your jacket and checked your purse for your phone and wallet. You checked the time and turned off the lights. You bid Sandy goodbye as she headed for her SUV and you took your usual route down the sidewalk towards your bus stop. 

You stopped short as the man was there. You were paranoid, he must just be waiting for the same route. You approached and he turned to watch you as you sat on the bench. He smiled and the dread sank deep in your chest. 

His rectangular glasses gave light to his blue eyes and a goatee trimmed his jaw. He was tall and well-built, you could tell even under his comic book tee. He was going to talk to you, another weirdo in the city.

“Hey,” his voice was chillingly familiar, “how was your day?”

You stared at him and blinked cluelessly. You looked around, it was only the two of you. You opened your mouth but you had to be wrong. He said your name and you winced.

“Jensen?” you breathed as you stood and squeezed the strap of your bag, “why? How--?”

“You weren’t answering me, I was worried,” he said, “just making sure you’re okay.”

“What the-- I don’t understand how--” He stepped closer and you backed up against the bench. “Don’t, I’ll scream.”

“Scream? Why? I’m just-- You know me, it’s me, Jensen.”

“You doxxed me?” you snapped, “what the hell?”

“No, I didn’t-- I’m just checking on you--”

“I don’t know you,” you said as your heart began to race, “so please, leave me alone,” you edged away from him, “and don’t message me again.”

You sprinted across the street and as you came up on the curb, you looked back at him. He watched you but didn’t follow. You could tell from there he wasn’t happy but the brim of his cap shadowed most of his face so you couldn’t guess if it was hurt or anger. You quickly spun away and continued down the next street to the nearest stop.

You couldn’t believe he’d just shown up like that. You couldn’t believe he would think that was okay. You couldn’t believe he’d think that much about you.

🎮

You blocked Jensen on Discord and left his world on Minecraft. That night you were shaky and nervous, afraid that he would show up at your apartment. Did he know where you lived? He must if he could figure out where you worked.

You didn’t open Steam that night. You paced your small apartment, jumping at every noise. Sleep didn’t come easily but in shallow spurts that left you even more tired. You watched over your shoulder as you walked to your stop and boarded with one eye on the door.

Work was little better as you found yourself distracted in the room full of toddlers. Sandy asked if you were okay as you kneaded play-do violently. You shook yourself out of your paranoia and assured her you were only short on sleep, not a complete lie.

You took out your phone when you stepped out for a small break. Your mom had called but you would have to get back to her when you had two hours to waste. There was another notification, that one from Discord, a friend request from JJ-NoRematch. It wasn’t hard to guess who it was and you declined it right away.

There were several others from Jensen, too. He followed your Insta, blocked; he followed your mostly empty twitter, blocked; and he even commented on your LinkedIn like a weird. You closed your phone and took a breath before you headed back into the kids, their voices rising in their excitement to go outside.

In the yard, you had another look around, expecting to see him there on the other side of the fence. You were slightly relieved when he wasn’t but still on edge. You joined a game of tag then watched several of the kids line up for the slide. You lost yourself in your job as you told yourself he must have gotten the hint, at least not to bother you irl.

Just like the day before, and every day, you left work and headed for your stop. He wasn’t there either and you sat down and phoned your mom, hanging up as the bus pulled up with a promise to call her again when you were home. At home, you felt almost normal again and checked your notifications; no more follows, no more requests, nothing.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday passed in a similar fashion. Each saw your anxieties less than the day before. You even resolved to open Steam and start a new world for yourself. You spent hours mining and almost fell asleep in your chair. When you nearly tipped over, you decided it was time for bed.

You slept better than you had all week and woke up before noon. You wanted to log right back on but you had life to deal with; groceries, cleaning, and of course, making that call to your mother you’d delayed the night before. After all that, you felt accomplished and you decided to treat yourself to take out, a rare divulgence.

You called the local Chinese eatery and waited eagerly for your feast as you turned on a new episode of your current binge. You played on your phone until the battery was low and had enough juice to buzz up the delivery man. You dug for your wallet as you went to the door and unlocked it without looking up.

“How much--” you asked as you opened the door.

Your eyes met a familiar pair, two blue gems behind a pair of narrow glasses. Jensen wore the same cap and held the paper bag of take-out with a smile. You grabbed the door and tried to swing it shut but he was too quick as he slapped a large hand against the peeling paint.

“It’s on me,” he said, “I love spare ribs.”

“What the--” you gasped as you pushed on the door helplessly, “please go away.”

“You’re not answering me,” he said as he stepped closer and forced you back as his body brushed against yours, “you blocked me and I can’t even get a hey, Jensen, how are you?”

“I don’t want you here,” you tried to shove him and he shouldered you away easily, “get out!”

He slammed the door and you flinched. He put the bag down on the corner table and reached back to twist the lock without a look. His eyes roved around your entryway and further into your apartment. He smiled as they stilled and focused on you.

“This place is cute… like you,” he said and you heard a slight hesitation in his voice.

You swallowed and backed away from him. You spun on your heel and ran for your couch. You reached over the back to your phone and unlocked it as the battery icon flashed. You had just enough juice to make the call. You dialed as you turned back to him.

“I’m calling the police so you b-better l-leave,” you warned as your voice and hands shook, “I me--”

He was quick and before you could pull away, he swiped your cell out of your hand. He scoffed and tossed it across the room. It hit the wall and landed screen down on the hardwood. You bit down and pressed yourself to the couch. You stared at him and kicked yourself forward as you tried to slip past him. He caught you and wrestled you back into the front room.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked calmly as you struggled in his grasp, “I’ve been nothing but nice to you.”

“N-no, you’re-- you-- let me go,” you stammered as he angled you around the couch. He pushed you down so you bounced on the cushion. You tried to push yourself up and he pointed his finger in your face and wagged it. 

“No, you stay,” he growled and wiped his other hand on his jeans. He was nervous, even if he was angry.

“Please, why-- what do you want?” you grasped the cushion and hovered at the edge of the couch.

He sighed and sat in the chair. He took his hat off and set it on the table as he ran his fingers through his short hair. 

“Good question,” he said as his jaw squared and his eyes turned to pinpoints, “better one, why did you block me?”

“Are you serious? You-- you--” you struggled to get your words out, your voice even more splintered by your fear, “you doxxed me, you came to-- to my work-- and…”

“I thought we were getting along. I thought you liked me,” he said with a frown, “I really did, you sure acted like it and-- I only wanted to make sure you were safe.”

“But why wouldn’t I be? I--” you shivered and crossed your arms as you withered beneath his gaze, “Jensen, this was only supposed to be online.”

He scoffed and stomped his boot on the floor. He shook his head as he looked to the ceiling and his anger bulged along his temple. He tilted his head and looked at you again.

“You know, for years, I have been a nice guy, I am a nice guy,” he pushed his shoulders to his ears as he threw his hand out, “I’m so patient and caring and you girls, you don’t even give me a second look.”

“Jensen--”

“No, really, I mean look at you, you’re no supermodel and yet it’s the same thing, ‘let’s just be friends’,” he spat, “but I watch guys all the time treat women like shit and they don’t have any trouble at all, they got them hanging off of them and I’m a creep for giving them a compliment or opening the door--”

“I don’t… know you,” you eked out, “you have to understand--”

“I don’t understand,” he stood abruptly, “I’m done trying to understand.”

He pulled his jacket open and slid it down his arms. You watched him sling it over the chair and as he turned back to you, you stood. He caught your shoulders and held you in place. His strength was plain in his grip as he squeezed then slowly moved his hands to cradle your face.

“I just wanna be nice,” he said as he leaned in. You tried to pull away but he moved a hand around the back of your head and forced your lips against his. He poked his tongue inside your mouth roughly as you tried to shove him away. Finally, he parted, his hands still firmly around your head, “wasn’t that nice?”

“Please,” you begged as he ran his thumb over your bottom lip.

His eyes searched your face as you stared back at him in terror. He sighed and dropped his hands back to your shoulders. He pushed you down to the sofa harshly and backed away.

“Fine, I won’t be nice,” he snarled as he took his glasses off and folded them carefully. He put them on the table beside his cap and twined his fingers together, loudly cracking his knuckles.

You blinked at him as your eyes grew glossy. You brought your legs up under you and pressed yourself to the back of the couch. You grasped the upholstery and turned as you launched yourself over to the other side. You stumbled as you landed on your feet and ran for the door.

You were yanked back as he snaked his arms around you and took you off your feet. You kicked out and screamed but it was cut off by his palm as he kept one arm around your middle. You scratched at his hand as he dragged you back to the couch. He pushed you face down onto the cushions and planted his knee in the middle of your back, slipping his hand away as he put enough weight on you to keep your voice suffocated.

“Listen, I know I look like some IT nerd but I’m a lot more than that, now don’t make me hurt you,” he played with your hair as he smiled down at you, “you try that again and I will shut you up and if someone hears you, I can take care of them too.”

You sniffed as tears pricked in your eyes and nodded frantically as it felt as if he would snap your spine. He pushed off of you and you stayed as you were, paralysed with fear. He sat and unlaced his boots one at a time. He looked up as he set them neatly beside the foot of the chair and he bent to catch your eye.

“Well?” he pointed at you and traced the line of your body in the air, “let’s go.”

You stared at him dumbly and he stood to pull his tee over his head. His torso was sculpted perfectly and his chest trimmed with hair that trailed all the way down to his pants. He stepped forward and tugged at the back of your shirt.

“You want me to do it for you, baby?” he purred, “I can help you.”

You swatted him away and sat up. You bent your legs to your chest and hugged them. “Please, I’m scared, just leave me alone--”

His hand rested on his belt and exhaled again. His fingers moved swiftly to unloop the striped belt and unbutton his jeans. He pushed them down, nearly tripping as he stepped out of them. He stood in his boxers, tented with his impatient excitement, and gripped his hips.

“It’s okay, baby, I know you’re shy, I am too,” he neared and you winced as he grabbed your wrist. He tugged on your arm and you resisted until he bent your hand back painfully and you cried out. He tickled your jaw as he looked you in the eye and tutted, “it doesn’t have to be like this, alright?”

You went limp and let him pull your arms apart. Your legs slipped down and your feet dangled above the floor. He got to his knees and pushed between yours. He slowly rolled up the hem of your shirt and bent to kiss your stomach as he bared the flesh. You trembled as he forced your arms up and swooped the fabric over your head. It fluttered through the air and to the floor as he cupped your tits through your bright pink bra.

“Is this so bad?” he asked as he nuzzled your chest and pushed your tits up. 

He glided the straps down your arm and slid your bra lower so that you popped out. He nibbled at your flesh and traced your nipples with his tongue. You sat rigid and let him explore your body, too terrified to move a muscle. He reached around you and struggled with the hooks, frustrated he snapped the clasps and the band came free.

He continued to play with your chest, his fingers crawling up and down your stomach and sides. There was a genuine curiosity to his touch and it sent a chill through you. His fingertips pressed to the top of your pants and he pulled at them as his lips travelled down to your hip.

He tugged on your pants and jerked your entire body. He tore them lower as he pushed you up and you lifted yourself to let him peel away the layer. He added them to the floor and toyed with the elastic of your panties. The little bow in the front drew his attention as he pushed your legs wider and ran his nose along the cotton.

He hummed and rubbed his fingers down your crotch, pushing the fabric to your folds as he teased you through them. You inhaled sharply at the tingle it inspired and he pressed firmer against you, flicking his fingers along your bud as he noticed how it made you squirm.

He gently pulled aside the cotton and you felt his hot breath against you. You pushed on his head before he could delve into you. “Please, don’t--”

“Shhhh,” he threw your hand away from his head and bent over you, “just relax.”

He dragged his tongue along your cunt and lingered around your clit. You clenched as it sent a thrill through you and he moved his lips against you, suckling at you bud as your breaths grew raspy. You pushed yourself against the back of the couch and dug your nails into the cushion.

He slid a finger along your cunt and circled your entrance. He rubbed up and down as he kept his tongue swirling over your clit and you swallowed back as gasp as he poked inside. He felt around and added another finger, stretching you as he carefully pushed them in and out of you in time with his mouth.

He lapped you up and you closed your eyes, desperate to resist the coil winding within you. Your legs tensed against the couch and you tilted your pelvis without thinking. He sped up, the noise of his mouth and your slickness filled the silence. You let out a puff and moaned as you slapped the couch. The waves rolled over your flesh and you came into his mouth with a pathetic mewl.

He stilled his fingers as he lazily teased you with his tongue. He pulled his fingers out and sat back, the heat between your legs cooling in his absence as he licked up your juices. He watched you as he sucked his fingers and stood. Your head lolled and you edged forward on the couch. You tried to stand but he caught you and flung you back.

“We’re not done, baby,” he winked at you as he grasped the top of his boxers, “go on, lay down.”

You murmured your refusal and once more tried to get up. You slipped onto the floor and shakily crawled away as he dropped his boxers to his ankle. He grabbed you before you could get around the side and lifted you easily. He turned you and shoved you down onto your back as he lifted a leg over you.

He straddled you and again his hands roved over your body. You smacked at his fingers weakly but he easily ignored you. He kept one hand moving along your curves as he stroked himself with the other. He groaned and shook as he stroked his dick. Your eyes followed his hand and you gulped, he was thick.

He moved his knees back and pushed them up beneath your thighs as he kept a hand planted on your chest. He ripped your panties down your legs and untangled them from your feet. 

He held you down as he ran his tip along your cunt, wetting himself with your coerced arousal. You groaned and grabbed the arm of the couch above you. You tried to pull away from him.

He pushed against your entrance and you looked at him in shock. You couldn’t stop him. His eyes were set between your legs as he inhaled and slowly eased into you. He gasped as he got his tip inside you and his muscles tensed. He bit his lip as he dove further in and you gasped as he filled you inch by inch.

“Shitttt,” he moaned as he reached his limit and you whined at how full you were, “oh, baby.”

His hand slid from your chest and he gripped your hips as he pulled back and thrust. You exclaimed and he did it again, slowly as he watched himself impale you over and over. You curled your fingers against the couch arm and your feet arch as you pressed your thighs around him. He lifted your pelvis high as he angled his dick even deeper.

“You feel so good,” he rasped, “oh, baby, you’re so good. Ahh-hh-hh,” his voice fizzled as your walls clenched him and you closed your eyes as you felt the heat building. 

He moved his hand along your thigh and stretched it over your pelvis, pushing his thumb to your clit as he kept his pace. He purred as you writhed helplessly against him and you panted through the rising ecstasy.

“Please, please, please…” you chanted, unsure if you were begging him to stop or for more.

He moaned as he sped up and you sucked your lip under your teeth as you neared your peak. You quivered as your orgasm crashed into you and you let out a strangled cry. He snarled and planted his hands beside your head as he leaned over you, his hot breath tickled your face as he pounded into you.

Your legs bent around him as his pelvis rubbed against you and the friction drove you to another climax. You held onto the arm of the couch as he fucked your harder and harder. He kissed you and nibbled at your lip as he groaned and hooked an arm under to hold you close.

“You’re gonna make me cum, baby,” he said against your cheek and you turned your head away from, “ah, here I--”

He spasmed and slammed into you. He took several long thrusts and stilled. He grunted and drew heavy breaths as he rested his weight over you. He grabbed your head and turned your head up as he pressed his forehead to yours. You kept your eyes closed as the flames slowly dwindled.

“Was that so bad?” he stroked your cheek and trailed his finger down to poke between your lips, “No, it’s what you wanted, isn’t it, baby?” he wiggled his hips and you hissed, “yeah, you want me.”

[stonefromthesky]

Interview with the UnDungeon composer - stonefromthesky

1. Tell us about yourself. How did you start making music? What were your influences?

As you know, I make music and perform it live under the name of stonefromthesky. I started this affair in 2012. Before that I played in several bands including I afloat, which was accepted quite warmly by the fans of underground music here in Ukraine. As for my influences, I believe that on subconscious level I’m drawn to art and aesthetics of 1990-2000s. You know, White Pony, Ghost Dog, Mezzanine, Fight Club, A Sun That Never Sets, that kind of stuff.

2. Soundtracks to pixel-art games are usually stylized after 8-bit or chiptune music. You offered a different approach for UnDungeon. Your music has much more live feel to it. Why did you choose such a course?

I believe that there is no point in following “established” rules. Pixel art and chiptune music are not interchangeable in my mind. Besides, UnDungeon has a certain vibe, and I did my best to translate it into a soundtrack.

3. Are there any specific rules or techniques that you follow while working on the soundtrack and sound design for the game?

When I’m working on music, I visualize myself playing the game. I try to interpret the visual and verbal art into audio. It is like translating. I look for an audio equivalent of the emotion I get from screenshots, videos, or the story.

Also, I believe in combining synthesized sounds with live recordings for the most interesting result. Furthermore, I like to use field recording in my music a lot. For example, the kick in The Shift was made by recording a tennis ball bouncing off a mirror. Yes, I’m that kind of a neighbor that throws a tennis ball into a wall for fun. That particular time the ball accidentally ricocheted into the mirror, and I was like: “That sounds cool. I need to sample this”. So, I took the mic and recorded the bounce. That’s what ended up being the kick drum in The Shift.

4. Tell us about your gear. Does a musician depend on material stuff, or is it more about the skill set and hard work?

If you want to make music, you will need some sort of gear anyway. Be it a guitar or a computer, or even a pair of drumsticks. Despite this fact, I believe that the skills and hard work are definitely way more important than gear, especially nowadays. A good musician will be able to make music with anything he has access to.

Regarding my stuff, I don’t need much. My guitar, bass, a couple of mics, and a laptop with an audio interface - is basically all the “hardware” that I need. On the software side, Ableton Live is my DAW of choice. In regards to VST’s, I use Reaktor, Kontakt, Diva, XLN stuff. You can hear Arturia’s Mini V in The Shift and Wasteland Law. When I don’t need to record a real guitar head and cabinet, then I use Amplitube or ReValver. Additionally, I record lots of live stuff, be it a guitar or some everyday objects that sound interesting. My mic of choice is SM57.

5. Are you playing video-games? What are your favorite ones?

I used to play a lot, but now I have to choose whether I spend my time playing a game or making music. Well, I choose the latter most of the time. However, video-games are very useful if you need to clear your head after a long creative session. And the cool thing is that they are still as fun as 10-15 years ago.

My genres of choice are RPG and Action, but I don’t restrain myself to them. My all-time favorite game is Max Payne. I’m a big fan of Fallout, Gothic, SW: KotOR, Baldur’s Gate, etc. The last game that I thoroughly enjoyed was Hyper Light Drifter.

6. Are there any ideas regarding your future work on the sounds and music of UnDungeon? Will you experiment more or are you certain about your vision?

There are lots of ideas. I will certainly experiment more.

7. You play live regularly. Are you performing any songs from the UnDungeon OST at your concerts?

I’ve been performing The Shift for almost a year now, both solo and with the band. You can check out the video here:

Additionally, lots of people asked for Riding the Void, so I consider adding it to the live set at some point.

8. Tell us more about your live shows. How do you transform the tracks for playing them live?

At the moment of writing this, I have two live-show formats: ‘solo’ and ‘with the band’. When I play alone, I shift my music towards the electronic side. Live drums are substituted with drum-machines and samplers, bass with monosynth, that kind of stuff. Playing with the band, on the other hand, has more rock feel to it.

9. What do you think is missing in the sound of modern games? What would you change in it if you could?

The sound of modern games is more professional than ever. Still, there is room for improvement. I would like braver, less generic, and more experimental soundtracks and sounds.

10. When is your next release? How different is it comparing to the last record?

The release of the new album is planned for this year. Sonically, I believe it is a solid step forward. This time everything will be way more diverse and deep. The record is loaded with food for thought if you are willing to surrender to it. That’s all information I can share right now.

This interview was originally posted here. Learn more about @undungeon here: http://undungeon.com/

Subscribe to stonefromthesky newsletter to know what is up, and stay in touch on SoundCloud, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

sfts

[ciathyzareposts]

Rex Nebular – To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before

Written by TBD.

Rex Nebular’s Log: Stardate – The Day The Music Died.3: I’d sometimes dreamed about what I’d do if I was a woman for a day. But in none of those dreams did I just wander around picking stuff up and solving puzzles. At least I feel a lot more welcome on this planet now. Now, let’s find out where these teleporters go…

When we’d last left our hero, she’d just come out of the gender bender with a brand new gender. I’d found the gender scanner to the south, but first I continue following the carnage my friend had made on his way to the teleporter.

I find another dead guard, and her arm half a screen away. I also find a tape player. Having gotten a tape from a dead body back in the hospital, I do the obvious.

My attempts to put my tape in the tape player showed me one of the quirks with the game’s interface.

Both of these are generic descriptions I get by clicking on random things.

Guessing that I could only put the tape in the player if I had both items in my inventory,  I took the tape player, and then the game let me insert and play the tape.

Whoever put someone called ‘Professor Pyro’ in charge of something called ‘Project Kablooey’ was just asking for trouble.

I take the dead guard’s separated arm and use it on a hand/fingerprint scanner to open a cupboard and get all my confiscated inventory back.

I also find a lamp in the cupboard, but don’t seem to be able to take it or do anything with it. It might be important later.

Off another dead body I take a credit chip (a credit card, basically) so now I have money if I ever need it.

I entered the teleporter, and noticed that the number above the keypad was the number I used to get to this teleporter. So presumably I can teleport to any location if I know the number of the target teleporter. I test this theory by pressing the number that had been on the surface teleporter, and it works – I end up on the surface. I go back to the village where I’d previously been kicked in the man-region as soon as I went north. Seeing as I no longer have a man-region, I figure I’ll be safe.

Last post I wondered if the game gave me different descriptions depending on my current gender. I think I have my answer.

The next screen contains a woman (who didn’t kick me this time), some chickens and a stream which blocks the way west.

I take the roasting chicken and try to cross the stream.

I should have listened to Spengler – the thing in the water is me being ripped apart by piranhas.

This is the second game I’ve played in a row which had a school of piranhas in a stream by a small village. I’m feeling nostalgic already.

I try to give/put/throw my chicken at the piranhas, but the game won’t let me. After picking up a new twinkifruit, I also fail to feed that to the animals.

Out of ideas on the surface, but armed with a new roast chicken, I go back through the teleporter to the underground and do some more exploring.

The southern area of the base had been off limits to me before due to my gender, but now I can pass the scanner safely and find some more rooms. This section is in a U shape, with the gender scanners on each upper section. I start at the western section.

The first door is the entrance to a bar. It’s ladies night (every night is ladies night) in the bar so I enter and take a stool. The woman on the seat next to me is a repairwoman, and she starts complaining about the teleporters. I consider using the bar’s teleporter until I see what happens to the lady who appears there.

Maybe she entered the other teleporter while holding her pet wallaby.

I didn’t understand what the giant flashing arrows were at first. Yes, I’m an idiot.

I eventually worked out (after leaving the bar and coming back later because I’m extremely unobservant) that the repairwoman had a list of broken teleporters in her back pocket. For some reason I thought the arrows had something to do with the dance floor.

For now, I buy some alcohol with my stolen credit chip and continue my exploration lap.

In the south section, I find the armory which I can easily enter with my security card.

Glad to see the word ‘humbled’ used correctly, rather than when somebody wins something for being the best in their field.. You can’t be humbled by winning an award, people!

I find a TARGET MODULE, which, according to its description, should allow me to ‘hit anything hard and fast if I attach it to a ship’s fire control computer‘. I take it and assume I’ll get the opportunity to upgrade my weapons with it later.

The other thing in the room that looks like it can be used is a blimp’s loading ramp. The ramp is currently blocked by a tank which I’m not able to drive. Perhaps I’ll find some instructions somewhere – or perhaps it’s just there to give the game an opportunity to tell another joke.

I think I’ve found ACME’s warehouse!

There’s a few more doors in the southern section. There’s a teleporter room, a lab and a storage room.

Trying the lab first, I find it’s the recently exploded Professor Pyro’s lab – I can tell by the large scorch mark on the floor.

I take some chemicals and check my old screenshots for the instructions for the bomb Professor Pyro had been making. I could have just played the audio tape again I suppose, but who has time for that?

Following the instructions, I make some explosives. I try to take them.

I laughed out loud at this one.

The teleporter room has, surprise surprise, a teleporter in it. (Actually it probably is a surprise – it’s not actually called the teleporter room, that’s just what I called it after looking inside.) I take note that this teleporter (4229) is past the gender scanner so if I need to enter this area as a man this is likely how I’ll do it.

In the storage room I find some empty charge cases, which are used to pack explosives. Not a very subtle hint, seeing as I’ve already tried to take the explosives, but I’m not going to complain. I also find a tar bucket.

For some reason I thought tar-and-feathering would do something here. That was before I realised the chicken I had was featherless, dead and cooked.

To the east is a door I can’t enter for now, so I return to the lab.

I put my explosives in the charge cases and try to blow stuff up. First, I try it on the door I can’t open.

Then on the tank blocking the blimp’s loading ramp.

Then I try throwing them at the piranhas.

Don’t ask me why piranha have a shark fin – I don’t know either.

I even try making an explosive piranha meal.

With disappointment that I can’t think of anything to blow up with my new explosives, it was at this point that I went back to the bar and worked out what the giant arrows had been pointing to earlier. I snatched the repair list from the woman’s back pocket and I now have a lot of teleporter codes.

The codes are:

2644 – off-line pending repairs

9853 – off-line pending repairs

4580 – off-line pending repairs

2116 – off-line pending repairs

8384 – recently tuned (this is the teleporter on the surface)

9113 – recently tuned (this is the teleporter I arrived in at the base)

1058 – need minor adjustments

0576 – need minor adjustments

4229 – due for gender-security maintenance (this is the teleporter that is in the base past the gender scanner)

That last item makes me even more confident that I can use teleporter 4229 to get to the women-only area as a man.

Seeing as teleporter 1058 is in need of minor adjustments, and I haven’t been there yet. Let’s see what’s there.

Okay. Minor adjustments needed. Understood.

I try the other location that needs minor adjustments and cross my fingers.

I’m alive – and in an exciting new area!

I’m now in an abandoned city and find a car, a car complete with moldy sock, empty soda cans and a long-expired air freshener. In other words, a man’s car.

Actually, in my experience men’s cars are usually tidier than women’s cars. It’s houses that men keep messy.

The car won’t activate because I’m a woman, so you can guess what I’m going to do next.

Hm. 9 potential locations. The possibilities are… well, nine.

This seems like an appropriate time to stop, so I’ll explore the locations in man-town next time.

Session time:  1 hour 15 minutes Total time: 3 hours 45 minutes

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please…try not to spoil any part of the game for me…unless I really obviously need the help…or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I’ve not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/rex-nebular-to-boldly-go-where-no-man-has-gone-before/

[vrheadsets]

Building For Collaboration: IrisVR On Adding New Features To Improve The VR Experience

Last year, we released a tool called Inspect Element for Prospect. This feature allows users to select an element in their project and view its properties, such as the layer the object belongs to or the material it is made of. The user can then flag it if it needs to be fixed later in the original 3D modeling tool.

A user can select, inspect and flag an element in Prospect,

The design, development, and testing of this feature involved all the teams at IrisVR in some capacity. This blog post will detail how we came up with the feature, how we developed it, and how we made sure that the tool would meet the needs and expectations of our users along the way.

The Opportunity

Most of our users belong to the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry and and rely on 3D building models to get work done. The objects they create have data associated with them – sometimes, tons of it! This data creation is known as Building Information Modeling (BIM) and it helps designers and engineers make sure that the decisions made regarding the program distribution, structural typology, material finishes, or mechanical systems selected are the right ones.

At IrisVR, our goal is to help users catch issues early to save time and money and keep the project stakeholders on the same page, and this led us to conceptualize a new tool, called “Inspect Element” that exposes BIM data in VR and facilitates an easier review and QA/QC process. This tool allows multiple people to review a given element in the shared virtual environment that Prospect provides. We knew we also needed to output a document to help record the design review done while in VR,help fix the 3D model, and move the project forward.

BIM Properties (left pane) of a roof selected in Revit.

Conceptualizing the “Inspect Element” Tool

Selecting an object on a 2D screen is a straightforward interaction. To make this action intuitive in virtual reality, I took inspiration from the typical interaction in 3D modeling tools on a screen and how we interact with objects in the real world. I looked specifically at what we can touch when we are on a construction site. To communicate with the rest of the team and to show users what the new tool would do, I spent some time sketching ideas on a notebook and on a whiteboard.

The tool would have two parts: a VR component and a Library component. In VR, the requirements were:

Provide visual feedback to the user when they pointed at an object

Allow the user to select an object and display its BIM properties, starting with name, layer and material

Allow the user to paint it red and flag it for review

The Library requirements were:

Display a list of the objects that had been flagged in VR and when

Ability to share the list with colleagues easily

Use the list to find the elements in the original program

A sketch of the early design for the Inspect Element tool

Tests

To test with our users, I built a proof of concept using C# in Unity to showcase what the Inspect Element tool would do. The prototype was rough, but it helped in conversations with architects and with the developers on our team. The video below shows the expected UX flow while reviewing a Revit model in VR:

Design

I created mockups for our VR tool to get feedback from our users in terms of which information they wanted to see. It was clear that we needed to include the Element Name (also the Family Name in the case of Revit elements), the layer the object belonged to and the name of the material assigned to it.

Highlight and selection states

Flagging and removing flag states

Along with the images above, I provided our engineers with notes regarding which button activates the feature (the trigger), if other actions (such as teleportation or taking screenshots) are permitted while this tool is being used, and any edge cases that needed to be addressed.

As a group and every week, the interaction team reviews together design work done by each of us. In this discussion, the case for objects with textured materials was made: what would an object that has a texture look like when flagged? Another image was added:

Flagged elements – with no texture (left) and with texture (right)

As we were working on this feature, our users asked repeatedly that we add a toggle right in the Inspect Element tool so that the entire layer the object belonged to could be switched off. This new action added complexity that we needed to document. For instance, if the layer of an object is set to off in this tool, we needed to make sure to display the same state in the Layers tool list.

A user can turn off the layer an object belongs to using the Inspect Element tool

In the Library, I followed a similar process and mocked up a new panel for the settings drawer called Flagged Elements. The list had to include the Element IDs, the name of the object (also including the Family Name), and would group the objects by date, to let the user know when the review was made.

Flagged Elements as mocked up for the Prospect Library

A button reading Export Report at the bottom would let the user download a CSV file that would contain all of the necessary information. A user could print this spreadsheet or copy the Element IDs and use them to find the objects in their 3D model.

  Report of Flagged Elements as a CSV file

Development – Part 1 (infrastructure)

Along with interaction/design discussions, we meet as often as possible with the development team to get their early feedback on what will be needed to support a new feature and understand how long it will take to get it built. The Inspect Element tool was especially complex because it meant new work and some “rewiring” in different parts of our export and loading processes.

We needed to export and save the name of the objects, their Element IDs, and the name of the materials they use while opening the door to support BIM data in the future. This would have to happen for all the file formats we support. While we decided to support flagging elements for all of them, we settled for only providing the object name and the element ID data for Revit files based on our user insights.

Additionally, it required a major change in how Prospect was grouping objects in VR so that we could highlight and select individual elements as needed without seeing a performance reduction. We also needed a new graphics system to create an outline around the selected object, a new tool that would change the appearance of the objects temporarily while keeping track of their state, and a new setting per file (Flagged Elements) that would display in the Library next to Viewpoints.

 Creating an outline for an object selected was a very involved process, so we decided to settle for painting the entire object instead – in green when selected, and in red when flagged.

Inspect Element tool as released in Prospect 1.7

Development – Part 2 (Multiuser Meetings support)

As we released Prospect 1.7, we were gearing up for our Multiuser Beta release in 1.8. We needed to add support for the Inspect Element tool while in a Meeting.

The Inspect Element tool being used on the Scale Model

Activating this feature while in a project with other users meant:

Adding two extra fields in the VR menu to reflect who currently had selected the element (Selected by) and who flagged it (Flagged by). It is important to note that, while in a Meeting, we don’t currently share a user’s menu content with other users in the session, so for two users to review the properties of an object together, they must select it and interact with their own menus independently. Letting each other know that they were looking at the same element at the same time was a basic requirement.

The first design for the Inspect Element menu (left) was enlarged to support Participants’ information while in Meetings (right)

Adding an extra field in the exported report from the Library (the CSV file) to log the name of user who flagged a given element. This is relevant to keep track of issues and to document who found them.

If a user turned changed the visibility of the layer of an object, it needed to send that layer state to the server so that all users could see that change as well.

Design and Development Iteration

In Prospect 2.0, we were able to add blue outlines to an object when it gets selected. Finally, the tool could successfully represent the state of an object that is selected and flagged at the same time, while giving the user a better visual feedback of its extents.

Inspect Element tool outlines

As we continue to add support for this feature, we will be working on fully integrating with Rhino  and SketchUp to output the list of elements that were flagged, we will be displaying BIM data from Revit, and we will providing a list of flagged elements not only in the Library but also while in VR. All of this with the goal of supporting our users across platforms and make the connection between their design tools and Prospect as seamless as possible.

Takeaways for our team

We learned a few things from creating the Inspect Element tool for Prospect:

Sketches are useful but VR prototypes are key to communicate ideas within our company and with our users.

While the scope for this feature was huge, we were able to reduce it due to development constraints and we released a feature that worked really well. Improving features over time is something we embrace and releasing an early version gave us more time to test and get feedback.

Providing support in Multiuser Meetings for the features we design means an extra layer of work for the entire team. From now on we will consider from the very beginning the design and development implications of having multiple people interact with our tools while in a Meeting in VR.

Selecting and flagging elements while in a Multiuser Meeting

If you are interested in trying out the Inspect Element tool: 

You can download Prospect Pro Plus here.

Find out how to flag Revit Elements in Prospect and review them in Revit, Dynamo and Navisworks here.

from VRFocus https://ift.tt/2IxOmqV

[lxryrestate28349]

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

If you want a play-by-play guide on how to use Google Optimize, Google has a whole help center for that. But if you’ve been using Google Optimize for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of lessons that fall outside the purview of that help center. And you have to learn most of them the hard way.

The two of us have run a lot of tests with Google’s Optimize, and we’ve probably made a mistake with every single one of those tests. Excuse me, I mean we learned something new with every single one of those tests.

If you’re new to Google Optimize, here are 13 tips and tricks we’ve gathered from all those learning experiences. Hopefully this blog post can help you start running fast, effective, and revealing A/B tests in half the time it took us to learn these lessons.

1. Setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM)

First, the very technical groundwork.

To use Google Optimize you will first need to install the Optimize tag on your website. There are several different ways you could go about the installation. The good news for you is that we’ve tried them all and one approach stands out as the clear winner.

We strongly recommend that you set up Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager (GTM). It allows for the fastest, most consistent deployment across your entire site, and taking the time to set up Tag Manager will pay dividends in your productivity and flexibility down the road. If you’re new to tag management, on the fence, or you just want to get ahead of the game, check out the Portent post on common mistakes in Google Tag Manager.

Once you’re up and running, the good news is that GTM comes with a built-in tag for Google Optimize.

To get started, you’ll create a new tag in your account, then specify that you want the Google Optimize tag.

Next, you’ll need to paste in your Google Analytics ID into the corresponding box as your tracking ID. You’ll also paste the container ID into the Optimize Container ID box.

Finally, you’ll want to set up a trigger to fire on every page of your site (or just the pages you want to test with Google Optimize). This trigger should already be offered as an option if you follow this install method, so you’ll simply select it.

Once you have everything set up as described you will want to go into preview mode in GTM make sure your tag works where and how you intended. It should look something like this.

Once you confirm that the Optimize tag is firing correctly in preview mode you’ll publish the tag to your live site. Once done, you’re set to create your first experiment in Google Optimize. (But read the next few sections before you do.)

A quick warning: Unlike Google’s guide to deploying Optimize with Google Tag Manger, we do not recommend that you set up the tag to fire before your Google Analytics tag. Doing this can actually cause your Analytics tag not to fire on the page you are testing via Optimize. Translation: the order in which you run the test as the page loads could leave you blind to your actual traffic in some cases.

2. Look at your traffic to set timeline expectations

Before you ever run an experiment in Google Optimize, one of the first things you need to do is make sure that pages receives enough traffic to run the test in a timely fashion.

We’ve had plenty of occasions where a client has a hunch they’d love to test for an important page, often near the bottom of their conversion funnel. But on inspection we see that there’s so little traffic that declaring a statistically significant winner would take over a month. That may be fine depending on your situation, but it’s incredibly important to set expectations if your boss or your executive team are expecting answers quickly.

As a rule, we recommend you choose pages for tests that average at least 1,000 pageviews a month over the last 3 to 6 months. This will ensure that your experiment gets steady traffic and the experiment is able to complete in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Semi-Pro Tip: If there’s a page that absolutely positively must be tested quickly but it’s low traffic, consider whether you could use paid ads to drive the right kind of prospects to this page at a higher pace.

Create a situation that allows you to say “Yes, and here’s what we would need to do to accelerate the timeline.” Again, work with your paid search and/or remarketing experts to work out what kind of audience and approach would drive the right traffic to this page. Translation: prospects that are at a similar stage of their buyer’s journey to those who will see the page in the future. Few things are worse than explaining an experiment led to the wrong conclusion because of a self-inflicted anomaly with your traffic.

Rule of thumb: target pages with 1,000 or more monthly pageviews

See Section 5 for some related takeaways and a little more on this topic.

3. Create a test plan

One drawback of using the basic, free version of Google Optimize is that you’re unable to run more than three simultaneous tests. Three parallel tests should still give most marketers plenty of horsepower, however, and the best way to stretch this for maximum insight is to create a real test plan.

What’s in a test plan? Whatever you want, as long as it gives you direction, project scope, and a clear path to answering your bottom line business question. But here are some ideas to get you started:

Page title and URL

Test type

Hypothesis

Targeting

Description of changes or screenshot of mockup

Page traffic and time estimate

Funnel or persona target of page

A good test plan looks and acts kind of like an editorial calendar, or Agile project management roadmap. Keep a shared document to which your team can add ideas for future tests (icebox), and work at least two weeks ahead. Tests take about two weeks to complete, depending on traffic, and a deliberate schedule of rolling launches will make those three simultaneous tests feel like an army.

4. Use custom objectives

Data might not “lie,” but it can definitely mislead. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Here’s an example of two goals set up on a test: session duration, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Session duration is a metric option baked into Optimize; our MQL data was pulled from a custom objective we set in Google Analytics. As you can see, the new variant wildly outperformed the original page in session duration, but interestingly drove far fewer MQLs:

Comparing performance by MQL

Comparing performance on Session Duration

If we’d just been looking at session duration, we might think our new variant won. But because we had a critical custom objective in place, we could tell that the original was actually converting more effectively. In this case, taking the time to get our real business goals and KPIs into the test saved us from pushing a “winning” variant to our whole site, which ultimately would have meant losing business.

5. Optimize is perfect for testing PPC landing pages

One of the coolest things about Google Optimize is that you’re able to use your experiments for PPC landing pages.

Using Optimize for PPC landers is might be the fastest way to see quantifiable ROI from A/B testing. Landers are typically high-converting pages with a clear, easy-to-measure goal. You can run multivariate tests with different form lengths, CTAs, titles, and imagery to determine the perfect formula for a high-performing landing page.

Pro-Tip: Extend the value of your newfound knowledge about what’s most effective for your target audience by crafting a set of landing-page best practices specific to your customers and your business. Make sure the learnings hold up, and keep iterating through new tests to drive your conversion rates even higher.

6. Consider starting on desktop-only

At this point, it’s a given for most marketers that you need to optimize your site for mobile traffic if you have any meaningful component of mobile visitors, let alone Google’s Mobile-first Index. This absolutely extends to testing messaging or layout changes to make sure that results do not differ by context.

That said, when you’re unsure how a change in Google Optimize will affect your CSS or breakpoints for mobile devices, you absolutely need to check. In fact, you need to check the mobile view no matter what. Trust us on this.

Although services like Unbounce or Google Optimize do have tools that allow you some control over a test appearance in mobile, it can definitely be time-consuming to get them up to snuff. In some cases with Google Optimize, we’ve simply hit a brick wall with certain complex or highly customized client sites.

For example, even on our own site getting the mobile version of a test right takes some elbow grease. Here’s a visual of a test from Portent’s Content Services page in Optimize on desktop view:

Looks fine. Now here’s the mobile view:

Ooph.

A mess, right? This is really common with Optimize. When you start moving containers around and changing the padding, your test might look fine on desktop but the mobile or tablet version will be borderline unreadable.

You can either work on your design until it works well for all devices or change the device targeting to only display to desktop users, traffic permitting:

See Section 11 for more on the importance of doing your own quality assurance.

7. Make the most of targeting options

Of course, you can (and should) target users and test based on more than just device-type. You can target users only on specific browsers, in specific countries, or even specific cities. (Or you can exclude these localities—for example, how well does your Space Needle picture and Seattle branding test with audiences outside Washington State?)

With “Page referrer” (located under “Behavior” in Google Optimize), you can target users arriving to your page through a specific source. For example, if you’re trying to test a new landing page for folks arriving via your blog, you can do that without creating a new URL; you could also serve the test only to folks coming in from a different website entirely.

With “Time since first arrival,” you can define how long a user must be on the website before the test fires in order to eliminate high-bounce sessions. And you can use JavaScript or information from your data layer to get even more granular with customers and their history on your site.

And if you’re lucky enough to have budget and need that justifies upgrading to Optimize 360, you can directly access all your Google Analytics audiences as a targeting segment.

8. Save your work

Seriously. Just do.

Optimize doesn’t have the same handy auto-save features as some of Google’s other products. If you close that window too early, kiss your test goodbye. You’ll be prompted to save if you’re trying to navigate back, but you’re SOL if you close all your tabs by accident.

Not that this has ever happened to us. Y’know, it just seems like it could be incredibly frustrating.

9. Use a script editor with script from the original website

Getting a little further into the nerdy technical best practices: When you create an experiment in Google Optimize you will have the option to work with a lot of code, and will frequently need to use it. When I first did an experiment through Optimize I had to start over at least three times because I forgot to use a script editor. Doing so keeps the code clean and accurate as you move it around.

We recommend inspecting the elements of normal, live, non-test pages on the site you’re working with and copying the code of elements you want to mimic into Atom or a similar editor.

At Portent we frequently use the script editor Atom, which is for Macs.

This means you don’t have to guess at the HTML for an element you want to create in your new design, and Atom keeps that code organized for you so you don’t make a mess of your Optimize layout. You can then paste that code right into your test design with the HTML.

Handy for not screwing up page layout, tables, image handling, etc.

10. Image hosting

Want to add an image to your test that doesn’t exist on the current website? There are two ways to do this.

Skipping ahead to the answer: The better way is to upload the image directly into the CMS of the site and link to that internal file. If you’re working for a client or you don’t have access to upload files to your site for whatever reason, an easy workaround is hosting your images on a free image hosting..

http://ift.tt/2ylUyzV

[seo75074]

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

If you want a play-by-play guide on how to use Google Optimize, Google has a whole help center for that. But if you’ve been using Google Optimize for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of lessons that fall outside the purview of that help center. And you have to learn most of them the hard way.

The two of us have run a lot of tests with Google’s Optimize, and we’ve probably made a mistake with every single one of those tests. Excuse me, I mean we learned something new with every single one of those tests.

If you’re new to Google Optimize, here are 13 tips and tricks we’ve gathered from all those learning experiences. Hopefully this blog post can help you start running fast, effective, and revealing A/B tests in half the time it took us to learn these lessons.

1. Setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM)

First, the very technical groundwork.

To use Google Optimize you will first need to install the Optimize tag on your website. There are several different ways you could go about the installation. The good news for you is that we’ve tried them all and one approach stands out as the clear winner.

We strongly recommend that you set up Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager (GTM). It allows for the fastest, most consistent deployment across your entire site, and taking the time to set up Tag Manager will pay dividends in your productivity and flexibility down the road. If you’re new to tag management, on the fence, or you just want to get ahead of the game, check out the Portent post on common mistakes in Google Tag Manager.

Once you’re up and running, the good news is that GTM comes with a built-in tag for Google Optimize.

To get started, you’ll create a new tag in your account, then specify that you want the Google Optimize tag.

Next, you’ll need to paste in your Google Analytics ID into the corresponding box as your tracking ID. You’ll also paste the container ID into the Optimize Container ID box.

Finally, you’ll want to set up a trigger to fire on every page of your site (or just the pages you want to test with Google Optimize). This trigger should already be offered as an option if you follow this install method, so you’ll simply select it.

Once you have everything set up as described you will want to go into preview mode in GTM make sure your tag works where and how you intended. It should look something like this.

Once you confirm that the Optimize tag is firing correctly in preview mode you’ll publish the tag to your live site. Once done, you’re set to create your first experiment in Google Optimize. (But read the next few sections before you do.)

A quick warning: Unlike Google’s guide to deploying Optimize with Google Tag Manger, we do not recommend that you set up the tag to fire before your Google Analytics tag. Doing this can actually cause your Analytics tag not to fire on the page you are testing via Optimize. Translation: the order in which you run the test as the page loads could leave you blind to your actual traffic in some cases.

2. Look at your traffic to set timeline expectations

Before you ever run an experiment in Google Optimize, one of the first things you need to do is make sure that pages receives enough traffic to run the test in a timely fashion.

We’ve had plenty of occasions where a client has a hunch they’d love to test for an important page, often near the bottom of their conversion funnel. But on inspection we see that there’s so little traffic that declaring a statistically significant winner would take over a month. That may be fine depending on your situation, but it’s incredibly important to set expectations if your boss or your executive team are expecting answers quickly.

As a rule, we recommend you choose pages for tests that average at least 1,000 pageviews a month over the last 3 to 6 months. This will ensure that your experiment gets steady traffic and the experiment is able to complete in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Semi-Pro Tip: If there’s a page that absolutely positively must be tested quickly but it’s low traffic, consider whether you could use paid ads to drive the right kind of prospects to this page at a higher pace.

Create a situation that allows you to say “Yes, and here’s what we would need to do to accelerate the timeline.” Again, work with your paid search and/or remarketing experts to work out what kind of audience and approach would drive the right traffic to this page. Translation: prospects that are at a similar stage of their buyer’s journey to those who will see the page in the future. Few things are worse than explaining an experiment led to the wrong conclusion because of a self-inflicted anomaly with your traffic.

Rule of thumb: target pages with 1,000 or more monthly pageviews

See Section 5 for some related takeaways and a little more on this topic.

3. Create a test plan

One drawback of using the basic, free version of Google Optimize is that you’re unable to run more than three simultaneous tests. Three parallel tests should still give most marketers plenty of horsepower, however, and the best way to stretch this for maximum insight is to create a real test plan.

What’s in a test plan? Whatever you want, as long as it gives you direction, project scope, and a clear path to answering your bottom line business question. But here are some ideas to get you started:

Page title and URL

Test type

Hypothesis

Targeting

Description of changes or screenshot of mockup

Page traffic and time estimate

Funnel or persona target of page

A good test plan looks and acts kind of like an editorial calendar, or Agile project management roadmap. Keep a shared document to which your team can add ideas for future tests (icebox), and work at least two weeks ahead. Tests take about two weeks to complete, depending on traffic, and a deliberate schedule of rolling launches will make those three simultaneous tests feel like an army.

4. Use custom objectives

Data might not “lie,” but it can definitely mislead. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Here’s an example of two goals set up on a test: session duration, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Session duration is a metric option baked into Optimize; our MQL data was pulled from a custom objective we set in Google Analytics. As you can see, the new variant wildly outperformed the original page in session duration, but interestingly drove far fewer MQLs:

Comparing performance by MQL

Comparing performance on Session Duration

If we’d just been looking at session duration, we might think our new variant won. But because we had a critical custom objective in place, we could tell that the original was actually converting more effectively. In this case, taking the time to get our real business goals and KPIs into the test saved us from pushing a “winning” variant to our whole site, which ultimately would have meant losing business.

5. Optimize is perfect for testing PPC landing pages

One of the coolest things about Google Optimize is that you’re able to use your experiments for PPC landing pages.

Using Optimize for PPC landers is might be the fastest way to see quantifiable ROI from A/B testing. Landers are typically high-converting pages with a clear, easy-to-measure goal. You can run multivariate tests with different form lengths, CTAs, titles, and imagery to determine the perfect formula for a high-performing landing page.

Pro-Tip: Extend the value of your newfound knowledge about what’s most effective for your target audience by crafting a set of landing-page best practices specific to your customers and your business. Make sure the learnings hold up, and keep iterating through new tests to drive your conversion rates even higher.

6. Consider starting on desktop-only

At this point, it’s a given for most marketers that you need to optimize your site for mobile traffic if you have any meaningful component of mobile visitors, let alone Google’s Mobile-first Index. This absolutely extends to testing messaging or layout changes to make sure that results do not differ by context.

That said, when you’re unsure how a change in Google Optimize will affect your CSS or breakpoints for mobile devices, you absolutely need to check. In fact, you need to check the mobile view no matter what. Trust us on this.

Although services like Unbounce or Google Optimize do have tools that allow you some control over a test appearance in mobile, it can definitely be time-consuming to get them up to snuff. In some cases with Google Optimize, we’ve simply hit a brick wall with certain complex or highly customized client sites.

For example, even on our own site getting the mobile version of a test right takes some elbow grease. Here’s a visual of a test from Portent’s Content Services page in Optimize on desktop view:

Looks fine. Now here’s the mobile view:

Ooph.

A mess, right? This is really common with Optimize. When you start moving containers around and changing the padding, your test might look fine on desktop but the mobile or tablet version will be borderline unreadable.

You can either work on your design until it works well for all devices or change the device targeting to only display to desktop users, traffic permitting:

See Section 11 for more on the importance of doing your own quality assurance.

7. Make the most of targeting options

Of course, you can (and should) target users and test based on more than just device-type. You can target users only on specific browsers, in specific countries, or even specific cities. (Or you can exclude these localities—for example, how well does your Space Needle picture and Seattle branding test with audiences outside Washington State?)

With “Page referrer” (located under “Behavior” in Google Optimize), you can target users arriving to your page through a specific source. For example, if you’re trying to test a new landing page for folks arriving via your blog, you can do that without creating a new URL; you could also serve the test only to folks coming in from a different website entirely.

With “Time since first arrival,” you can define how long a user must be on the website before the test fires in order to eliminate high-bounce sessions. And you can use JavaScript or information from your data layer to get even more granular with customers and their history on your site.

And if you’re lucky enough to have budget and need that justifies upgrading to Optimize 360, you can directly access all your Google Analytics audiences as a targeting segment.

8. Save your work

Seriously. Just do.

Optimize doesn’t have the same handy auto-save features as some of Google’s other products. If you close that window too early, kiss your test goodbye. You’ll be prompted to save if you’re trying to navigate back, but you’re SOL if you close all your tabs by accident.

Not that this has ever happened to us. Y’know, it just seems like it could be incredibly frustrating.

9. Use a script editor with script from the original website

Getting a little further into the nerdy technical best practices: When you create an experiment in Google Optimize you will have the option to work with a lot of code, and will frequently need to use it. When I first did an experiment through Optimize I had to start over at least three times because I forgot to use a script editor. Doing so keeps the code clean and accurate as you move it around.

We recommend inspecting the elements of normal, live, non-test pages on the site you’re working with and copying the code of elements you want to mimic into Atom or a similar editor.

At Portent we frequently use the script editor Atom, which is for Macs.

This means you don’t have to guess at the HTML for an element you want to create in your new design, and Atom keeps that code organized for you so you don’t make a mess of your Optimize layout. You can then paste that code right into your test design with the HTML.

Handy for not screwing up page layout, tables, image handling, etc.

10. Image hosting

Want to add an image to your test that doesn’t exist on the current website? There are two ways to do this.

Skipping ahead to the answer: The better way is to upload the image directly into the CMS of the site and link to that internal file. If you’re working for a client or you don’t have access to upload files to your site for whatever reason, an easy workaround is hosting your images on a free image hosting..

http://ift.tt/2ylUyzV

[piatty29033]

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

If you want a play-by-play guide on how to use Google Optimize, Google has a whole help center for that. But if you’ve been using Google Optimize for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of lessons that fall outside the purview of that help center. And you have to learn most of them the hard way.

The two of us have run a lot of tests with Google’s Optimize, and we’ve probably made a mistake with every single one of those tests. Excuse me, I mean we learned something new with every single one of those tests.

If you’re new to Google Optimize, here are 13 tips and tricks we’ve gathered from all those learning experiences. Hopefully this blog post can help you start running fast, effective, and revealing A/B tests in half the time it took us to learn these lessons.

1. Setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM)

First, the very technical groundwork.

To use Google Optimize you will first need to install the Optimize tag on your website. There are several different ways you could go about the installation. The good news for you is that we’ve tried them all and one approach stands out as the clear winner.

We strongly recommend that you set up Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager (GTM). It allows for the fastest, most consistent deployment across your entire site, and taking the time to set up Tag Manager will pay dividends in your productivity and flexibility down the road. If you’re new to tag management, on the fence, or you just want to get ahead of the game, check out the Portent post on common mistakes in Google Tag Manager.

Once you’re up and running, the good news is that GTM comes with a built-in tag for Google Optimize.

To get started, you’ll create a new tag in your account, then specify that you want the Google Optimize tag.

Next, you’ll need to paste in your Google Analytics ID into the corresponding box as your tracking ID. You’ll also paste the container ID into the Optimize Container ID box.

Finally, you’ll want to set up a trigger to fire on every page of your site (or just the pages you want to test with Google Optimize). This trigger should already be offered as an option if you follow this install method, so you’ll simply select it.

Once you have everything set up as described you will want to go into preview mode in GTM make sure your tag works where and how you intended. It should look something like this.

Once you confirm that the Optimize tag is firing correctly in preview mode you’ll publish the tag to your live site. Once done, you’re set to create your first experiment in Google Optimize. (But read the next few sections before you do.)

A quick warning: Unlike Google’s guide to deploying Optimize with Google Tag Manger, we do not recommend that you set up the tag to fire before your Google Analytics tag. Doing this can actually cause your Analytics tag not to fire on the page you are testing via Optimize. Translation: the order in which you run the test as the page loads could leave you blind to your actual traffic in some cases.

2. Look at your traffic to set timeline expectations

Before you ever run an experiment in Google Optimize, one of the first things you need to do is make sure that pages receives enough traffic to run the test in a timely fashion.

We’ve had plenty of occasions where a client has a hunch they’d love to test for an important page, often near the bottom of their conversion funnel. But on inspection we see that there’s so little traffic that declaring a statistically significant winner would take over a month. That may be fine depending on your situation, but it’s incredibly important to set expectations if your boss or your executive team are expecting answers quickly.

As a rule, we recommend you choose pages for tests that average at least 1,000 pageviews a month over the last 3 to 6 months. This will ensure that your experiment gets steady traffic and the experiment is able to complete in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Semi-Pro Tip: If there’s a page that absolutely positively must be tested quickly but it’s low traffic, consider whether you could use paid ads to drive the right kind of prospects to this page at a higher pace.

Create a situation that allows you to say “Yes, and here’s what we would need to do to accelerate the timeline.” Again, work with your paid search and/or remarketing experts to work out what kind of audience and approach would drive the right traffic to this page. Translation: prospects that are at a similar stage of their buyer’s journey to those who will see the page in the future. Few things are worse than explaining an experiment led to the wrong conclusion because of a self-inflicted anomaly with your traffic.

Rule of thumb: target pages with 1,000 or more monthly pageviews

See Section 5 for some related takeaways and a little more on this topic.

3. Create a test plan

One drawback of using the basic, free version of Google Optimize is that you’re unable to run more than three simultaneous tests. Three parallel tests should still give most marketers plenty of horsepower, however, and the best way to stretch this for maximum insight is to create a real test plan.

What’s in a test plan? Whatever you want, as long as it gives you direction, project scope, and a clear path to answering your bottom line business question. But here are some ideas to get you started:

Page title and URL

Test type

Hypothesis

Targeting

Description of changes or screenshot of mockup

Page traffic and time estimate

Funnel or persona target of page

A good test plan looks and acts kind of like an editorial calendar, or Agile project management roadmap. Keep a shared document to which your team can add ideas for future tests (icebox), and work at least two weeks ahead. Tests take about two weeks to complete, depending on traffic, and a deliberate schedule of rolling launches will make those three simultaneous tests feel like an army.

4. Use custom objectives

Data might not “lie,” but it can definitely mislead. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Here’s an example of two goals set up on a test: session duration, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Session duration is a metric option baked into Optimize; our MQL data was pulled from a custom objective we set in Google Analytics. As you can see, the new variant wildly outperformed the original page in session duration, but interestingly drove far fewer MQLs:

Comparing performance by MQL

Comparing performance on Session Duration

If we’d just been looking at session duration, we might think our new variant won. But because we had a critical custom objective in place, we could tell that the original was actually converting more effectively. In this case, taking the time to get our real business goals and KPIs into the test saved us from pushing a “winning” variant to our whole site, which ultimately would have meant losing business.

5. Optimize is perfect for testing PPC landing pages

One of the coolest things about Google Optimize is that you’re able to use your experiments for PPC landing pages.

Using Optimize for PPC landers is might be the fastest way to see quantifiable ROI from A/B testing. Landers are typically high-converting pages with a clear, easy-to-measure goal. You can run multivariate tests with different form lengths, CTAs, titles, and imagery to determine the perfect formula for a high-performing landing page.

Pro-Tip: Extend the value of your newfound knowledge about what’s most effective for your target audience by crafting a set of landing-page best practices specific to your customers and your business. Make sure the learnings hold up, and keep iterating through new tests to drive your conversion rates even higher.

6. Consider starting on desktop-only

At this point, it’s a given for most marketers that you need to optimize your site for mobile traffic if you have any meaningful component of mobile visitors, let alone Google’s Mobile-first Index. This absolutely extends to testing messaging or layout changes to make sure that results do not differ by context.

That said, when you’re unsure how a change in Google Optimize will affect your CSS or breakpoints for mobile devices, you absolutely need to check. In fact, you need to check the mobile view no matter what. Trust us on this.

Although services like Unbounce or Google Optimize do have tools that allow you some control over a test appearance in mobile, it can definitely be time-consuming to get them up to snuff. In some cases with Google Optimize, we’ve simply hit a brick wall with certain complex or highly customized client sites.

For example, even on our own site getting the mobile version of a test right takes some elbow grease. Here’s a visual of a test from Portent’s Content Services page in Optimize on desktop view:

Looks fine. Now here’s the mobile view:

Ooph.

A mess, right? This is really common with Optimize. When you start moving containers around and changing the padding, your test might look fine on desktop but the mobile or tablet version will be borderline unreadable.

You can either work on your design until it works well for all devices or change the device targeting to only display to desktop users, traffic permitting:

See Section 11 for more on the importance of doing your own quality assurance.

7. Make the most of targeting options

Of course, you can (and should) target users and test based on more than just device-type. You can target users only on specific browsers, in specific countries, or even specific cities. (Or you can exclude these localities—for example, how well does your Space Needle picture and Seattle branding test with audiences outside Washington State?)

With “Page referrer” (located under “Behavior” in Google Optimize), you can target users arriving to your page through a specific source. For example, if you’re trying to test a new landing page for folks arriving via your blog, you can do that without creating a new URL; you could also serve the test only to folks coming in from a different website entirely.

With “Time since first arrival,” you can define how long a user must be on the website before the test fires in order to eliminate high-bounce sessions. And you can use JavaScript or information from your data layer to get even more granular with customers and their history on your site.

And if you’re lucky enough to have budget and need that justifies upgrading to Optimize 360, you can directly access all your Google Analytics audiences as a targeting segment.

8. Save your work

Seriously. Just do.

Optimize doesn’t have the same handy auto-save features as some of Google’s other products. If you close that window too early, kiss your test goodbye. You’ll be prompted to save if you’re trying to navigate back, but you’re SOL if you close all your tabs by accident.

Not that this has ever happened to us. Y’know, it just seems like it could be incredibly frustrating.

9. Use a script editor with script from the original website

Getting a little further into the nerdy technical best practices: When you create an experiment in Google Optimize you will have the option to work with a lot of code, and will frequently need to use it. When I first did an experiment through Optimize I had to start over at least three times because I forgot to use a script editor. Doing so keeps the code clean and accurate as you move it around.

We recommend inspecting the elements of normal, live, non-test pages on the site you’re working with and copying the code of elements you want to mimic into Atom or a similar editor.

At Portent we frequently use the script editor Atom, which is for Macs.

This means you don’t have to guess at the HTML for an element you want to create in your new design, and Atom keeps that code organized for you so you don’t make a mess of your Optimize layout. You can then paste that code right into your test design with the HTML.

Handy for not screwing up page layout, tables, image handling, etc.

10. Image hosting

Want to add an image to your test that doesn’t exist on the current website? There are two ways to do this.

Skipping ahead to the answer: The better way is to upload the image directly into the CMS of the site and link to that internal file. If you’re working for a client or you don’t have access to upload files to your site for whatever reason, an easy workaround is hosting your images on a free image hosting..

http://ift.tt/2ylUyzV

[duiatty48170]

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

If you want a play-by-play guide on how to use Google Optimize, Google has a whole help center for that. But if you’ve been using Google Optimize for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of lessons that fall outside the purview of that help center. And you have to learn most of them the hard way.

The two of us have run a lot of tests with Google’s Optimize, and we’ve probably made a mistake with every single one of those tests. Excuse me, I mean we learned something new with every single one of those tests.

If you’re new to Google Optimize, here are 13 tips and tricks we’ve gathered from all those learning experiences. Hopefully this blog post can help you start running fast, effective, and revealing A/B tests in half the time it took us to learn these lessons.

1. Setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM)

First, the very technical groundwork.

To use Google Optimize you will first need to install the Optimize tag on your website. There are several different ways you could go about the installation. The good news for you is that we’ve tried them all and one approach stands out as the clear winner.

We strongly recommend that you set up Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager (GTM). It allows for the fastest, most consistent deployment across your entire site, and taking the time to set up Tag Manager will pay dividends in your productivity and flexibility down the road. If you’re new to tag management, on the fence, or you just want to get ahead of the game, check out the Portent post on common mistakes in Google Tag Manager.

Once you’re up and running, the good news is that GTM comes with a built-in tag for Google Optimize.

To get started, you’ll create a new tag in your account, then specify that you want the Google Optimize tag.

Next, you’ll need to paste in your Google Analytics ID into the corresponding box as your tracking ID. You’ll also paste the container ID into the Optimize Container ID box.

Finally, you’ll want to set up a trigger to fire on every page of your site (or just the pages you want to test with Google Optimize). This trigger should already be offered as an option if you follow this install method, so you’ll simply select it.

Once you have everything set up as described you will want to go into preview mode in GTM make sure your tag works where and how you intended. It should look something like this.

Once you confirm that the Optimize tag is firing correctly in preview mode you’ll publish the tag to your live site. Once done, you’re set to create your first experiment in Google Optimize. (But read the next few sections before you do.)

A quick warning: Unlike Google’s guide to deploying Optimize with Google Tag Manger, we do not recommend that you set up the tag to fire before your Google Analytics tag. Doing this can actually cause your Analytics tag not to fire on the page you are testing via Optimize. Translation: the order in which you run the test as the page loads could leave you blind to your actual traffic in some cases.

2. Look at your traffic to set timeline expectations

Before you ever run an experiment in Google Optimize, one of the first things you need to do is make sure that pages receives enough traffic to run the test in a timely fashion.

We’ve had plenty of occasions where a client has a hunch they’d love to test for an important page, often near the bottom of their conversion funnel. But on inspection we see that there’s so little traffic that declaring a statistically significant winner would take over a month. That may be fine depending on your situation, but it’s incredibly important to set expectations if your boss or your executive team are expecting answers quickly.

As a rule, we recommend you choose pages for tests that average at least 1,000 pageviews a month over the last 3 to 6 months. This will ensure that your experiment gets steady traffic and the experiment is able to complete in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Semi-Pro Tip: If there’s a page that absolutely positively must be tested quickly but it’s low traffic, consider whether you could use paid ads to drive the right kind of prospects to this page at a higher pace.

Create a situation that allows you to say “Yes, and here’s what we would need to do to accelerate the timeline.” Again, work with your paid search and/or remarketing experts to work out what kind of audience and approach would drive the right traffic to this page. Translation: prospects that are at a similar stage of their buyer’s journey to those who will see the page in the future. Few things are worse than explaining an experiment led to the wrong conclusion because of a self-inflicted anomaly with your traffic.

Rule of thumb: target pages with 1,000 or more monthly pageviews

See Section 5 for some related takeaways and a little more on this topic.

3. Create a test plan

One drawback of using the basic, free version of Google Optimize is that you’re unable to run more than three simultaneous tests. Three parallel tests should still give most marketers plenty of horsepower, however, and the best way to stretch this for maximum insight is to create a real test plan.

What’s in a test plan? Whatever you want, as long as it gives you direction, project scope, and a clear path to answering your bottom line business question. But here are some ideas to get you started:

Page title and URL

Test type

Hypothesis

Targeting

Description of changes or screenshot of mockup

Page traffic and time estimate

Funnel or persona target of page

A good test plan looks and acts kind of like an editorial calendar, or Agile project management roadmap. Keep a shared document to which your team can add ideas for future tests (icebox), and work at least two weeks ahead. Tests take about two weeks to complete, depending on traffic, and a deliberate schedule of rolling launches will make those three simultaneous tests feel like an army.

4. Use custom objectives

Data might not “lie,” but it can definitely mislead. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Here’s an example of two goals set up on a test: session duration, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Session duration is a metric option baked into Optimize; our MQL data was pulled from a custom objective we set in Google Analytics. As you can see, the new variant wildly outperformed the original page in session duration, but interestingly drove far fewer MQLs:

Comparing performance by MQL

Comparing performance on Session Duration

If we’d just been looking at session duration, we might think our new variant won. But because we had a critical custom objective in place, we could tell that the original was actually converting more effectively. In this case, taking the time to get our real business goals and KPIs into the test saved us from pushing a “winning” variant to our whole site, which ultimately would have meant losing business.

5. Optimize is perfect for testing PPC landing pages

One of the coolest things about Google Optimize is that you’re able to use your experiments for PPC landing pages.

Using Optimize for PPC landers is might be the fastest way to see quantifiable ROI from A/B testing. Landers are typically high-converting pages with a clear, easy-to-measure goal. You can run multivariate tests with different form lengths, CTAs, titles, and imagery to determine the perfect formula for a high-performing landing page.

Pro-Tip: Extend the value of your newfound knowledge about what’s most effective for your target audience by crafting a set of landing-page best practices specific to your customers and your business. Make sure the learnings hold up, and keep iterating through new tests to drive your conversion rates even higher.

6. Consider starting on desktop-only

At this point, it’s a given for most marketers that you need to optimize your site for mobile traffic if you have any meaningful component of mobile visitors, let alone Google’s Mobile-first Index. This absolutely extends to testing messaging or layout changes to make sure that results do not differ by context.

That said, when you’re unsure how a change in Google Optimize will affect your CSS or breakpoints for mobile devices, you absolutely need to check. In fact, you need to check the mobile view no matter what. Trust us on this.

Although services like Unbounce or Google Optimize do have tools that allow you some control over a test appearance in mobile, it can definitely be time-consuming to get them up to snuff. In some cases with Google Optimize, we’ve simply hit a brick wall with certain complex or highly customized client sites.

For example, even on our own site getting the mobile version of a test right takes some elbow grease. Here’s a visual of a test from Portent’s Content Services page in Optimize on desktop view:

Looks fine. Now here’s the mobile view:

Ooph.

A mess, right? This is really common with Optimize. When you start moving containers around and changing the padding, your test might look fine on desktop but the mobile or tablet version will be borderline unreadable.

You can either work on your design until it works well for all devices or change the device targeting to only display to desktop users, traffic permitting:

See Section 11 for more on the importance of doing your own quality assurance.

7. Make the most of targeting options

Of course, you can (and should) target users and test based on more than just device-type. You can target users only on specific browsers, in specific countries, or even specific cities. (Or you can exclude these localities—for example, how well does your Space Needle picture and Seattle branding test with audiences outside Washington State?)

With “Page referrer” (located under “Behavior” in Google Optimize), you can target users arriving to your page through a specific source. For example, if you’re trying to test a new landing page for folks arriving via your blog, you can do that without creating a new URL; you could also serve the test only to folks coming in from a different website entirely.

With “Time since first arrival,” you can define how long a user must be on the website before the test fires in order to eliminate high-bounce sessions. And you can use JavaScript or information from your data layer to get even more granular with customers and their history on your site.

And if you’re lucky enough to have budget and need that justifies upgrading to Optimize 360, you can directly access all your Google Analytics audiences as a targeting segment.

8. Save your work

Seriously. Just do.

Optimize doesn’t have the same handy auto-save features as some of Google’s other products. If you close that window too early, kiss your test goodbye. You’ll be prompted to save if you’re trying to navigate back, but you’re SOL if you close all your tabs by accident.

Not that this has ever happened to us. Y’know, it just seems like it could be incredibly frustrating.

9. Use a script editor with script from the original website

Getting a little further into the nerdy technical best practices: When you create an experiment in Google Optimize you will have the option to work with a lot of code, and will frequently need to use it. When I first did an experiment through Optimize I had to start over at least three times because I forgot to use a script editor. Doing so keeps the code clean and accurate as you move it around.

We recommend inspecting the elements of normal, live, non-test pages on the site you’re working with and copying the code of elements you want to mimic into Atom or a similar editor.

At Portent we frequently use the script editor Atom, which is for Macs.

This means you don’t have to guess at the HTML for an element you want to create in your new design, and Atom keeps that code organized for you so you don’t make a mess of your Optimize layout. You can then paste that code right into your test design with the HTML.

Handy for not screwing up page layout, tables, image handling, etc.

10. Image hosting

Want to add an image to your test that doesn’t exist on the current website? There are two ways to do this.

Skipping ahead to the answer: The better way is to upload the image directly into the CMS of the site and link to that internal file. If you’re working for a client or you don’t have access to upload files to your site for whatever reason, an easy workaround is hosting your images on a free image hosting..

http://ift.tt/2ylUyzV

[personalinjurylawyer93555]

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

If you want a play-by-play guide on how to use Google Optimize, Google has a whole help center for that. But if you’ve been using Google Optimize for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of lessons that fall outside the purview of that help center. And you have to learn most of them the hard way.

The two of us have run a lot of tests with Google’s Optimize, and we’ve probably made a mistake with every single one of those tests. Excuse me, I mean we learned something new with every single one of those tests.

If you’re new to Google Optimize, here are 13 tips and tricks we’ve gathered from all those learning experiences. Hopefully this blog post can help you start running fast, effective, and revealing A/B tests in half the time it took us to learn these lessons.

1. Setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM)

First, the very technical groundwork.

To use Google Optimize you will first need to install the Optimize tag on your website. There are several different ways you could go about the installation. The good news for you is that we’ve tried them all and one approach stands out as the clear winner.

We strongly recommend that you set up Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager (GTM). It allows for the fastest, most consistent deployment across your entire site, and taking the time to set up Tag Manager will pay dividends in your productivity and flexibility down the road. If you’re new to tag management, on the fence, or you just want to get ahead of the game, check out the Portent post on common mistakes in Google Tag Manager.

Once you’re up and running, the good news is that GTM comes with a built-in tag for Google Optimize.

To get started, you’ll create a new tag in your account, then specify that you want the Google Optimize tag.

Next, you’ll need to paste in your Google Analytics ID into the corresponding box as your tracking ID. You’ll also paste the container ID into the Optimize Container ID box.

Finally, you’ll want to set up a trigger to fire on every page of your site (or just the pages you want to test with Google Optimize). This trigger should already be offered as an option if you follow this install method, so you’ll simply select it.

Once you have everything set up as described you will want to go into preview mode in GTM make sure your tag works where and how you intended. It should look something like this.

Once you confirm that the Optimize tag is firing correctly in preview mode you’ll publish the tag to your live site. Once done, you’re set to create your first experiment in Google Optimize. (But read the next few sections before you do.)

A quick warning: Unlike Google’s guide to deploying Optimize with Google Tag Manger, we do not recommend that you set up the tag to fire before your Google Analytics tag. Doing this can actually cause your Analytics tag not to fire on the page you are testing via Optimize. Translation: the order in which you run the test as the page loads could leave you blind to your actual traffic in some cases.

2. Look at your traffic to set timeline expectations

Before you ever run an experiment in Google Optimize, one of the first things you need to do is make sure that pages receives enough traffic to run the test in a timely fashion.

We’ve had plenty of occasions where a client has a hunch they’d love to test for an important page, often near the bottom of their conversion funnel. But on inspection we see that there’s so little traffic that declaring a statistically significant winner would take over a month. That may be fine depending on your situation, but it’s incredibly important to set expectations if your boss or your executive team are expecting answers quickly.

As a rule, we recommend you choose pages for tests that average at least 1,000 pageviews a month over the last 3 to 6 months. This will ensure that your experiment gets steady traffic and the experiment is able to complete in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Semi-Pro Tip: If there’s a page that absolutely positively must be tested quickly but it’s low traffic, consider whether you could use paid ads to drive the right kind of prospects to this page at a higher pace.

Create a situation that allows you to say “Yes, and here’s what we would need to do to accelerate the timeline.” Again, work with your paid search and/or remarketing experts to work out what kind of audience and approach would drive the right traffic to this page. Translation: prospects that are at a similar stage of their buyer’s journey to those who will see the page in the future. Few things are worse than explaining an experiment led to the wrong conclusion because of a self-inflicted anomaly with your traffic.

Rule of thumb: target pages with 1,000 or more monthly pageviews

See Section 5 for some related takeaways and a little more on this topic.

3. Create a test plan

One drawback of using the basic, free version of Google Optimize is that you’re unable to run more than three simultaneous tests. Three parallel tests should still give most marketers plenty of horsepower, however, and the best way to stretch this for maximum insight is to create a real test plan.

What’s in a test plan? Whatever you want, as long as it gives you direction, project scope, and a clear path to answering your bottom line business question. But here are some ideas to get you started:

Page title and URL

Test type

Hypothesis

Targeting

Description of changes or screenshot of mockup

Page traffic and time estimate

Funnel or persona target of page

A good test plan looks and acts kind of like an editorial calendar, or Agile project management roadmap. Keep a shared document to which your team can add ideas for future tests (icebox), and work at least two weeks ahead. Tests take about two weeks to complete, depending on traffic, and a deliberate schedule of rolling launches will make those three simultaneous tests feel like an army.

4. Use custom objectives

Data might not “lie,” but it can definitely mislead. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Here’s an example of two goals set up on a test: session duration, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Session duration is a metric option baked into Optimize; our MQL data was pulled from a custom objective we set in Google Analytics. As you can see, the new variant wildly outperformed the original page in session duration, but interestingly drove far fewer MQLs:

Comparing performance by MQL

Comparing performance on Session Duration

If we’d just been looking at session duration, we might think our new variant won. But because we had a critical custom objective in place, we could tell that the original was actually converting more effectively. In this case, taking the time to get our real business goals and KPIs into the test saved us from pushing a “winning” variant to our whole site, which ultimately would have meant losing business.

5. Optimize is perfect for testing PPC landing pages

One of the coolest things about Google Optimize is that you’re able to use your experiments for PPC landing pages.

Using Optimize for PPC landers is might be the fastest way to see quantifiable ROI from A/B testing. Landers are typically high-converting pages with a clear, easy-to-measure goal. You can run multivariate tests with different form lengths, CTAs, titles, and imagery to determine the perfect formula for a high-performing landing page.

Pro-Tip: Extend the value of your newfound knowledge about what’s most effective for your target audience by crafting a set of landing-page best practices specific to your customers and your business. Make sure the learnings hold up, and keep iterating through new tests to drive your conversion rates even higher.

6. Consider starting on desktop-only

At this point, it’s a given for most marketers that you need to optimize your site for mobile traffic if you have any meaningful component of mobile visitors, let alone Google’s Mobile-first Index. This absolutely extends to testing messaging or layout changes to make sure that results do not differ by context.

That said, when you’re unsure how a change in Google Optimize will affect your CSS or breakpoints for mobile devices, you absolutely need to check. In fact, you need to check the mobile view no matter what. Trust us on this.

Although services like Unbounce or Google Optimize do have tools that allow you some control over a test appearance in mobile, it can definitely be time-consuming to get them up to snuff. In some cases with Google Optimize, we’ve simply hit a brick wall with certain complex or highly customized client sites.

For example, even on our own site getting the mobile version of a test right takes some elbow grease. Here’s a visual of a test from Portent’s Content Services page in Optimize on desktop view:

Looks fine. Now here’s the mobile view:

Ooph.

A mess, right? This is really common with Optimize. When you start moving containers around and changing the padding, your test might look fine on desktop but the mobile or tablet version will be borderline unreadable.

You can either work on your design until it works well for all devices or change the device targeting to only display to desktop users, traffic permitting:

See Section 11 for more on the importance of doing your own quality assurance.

7. Make the most of targeting options

Of course, you can (and should) target users and test based on more than just device-type. You can target users only on specific browsers, in specific countries, or even specific cities. (Or you can exclude these localities—for example, how well does your Space Needle picture and Seattle branding test with audiences outside Washington State?)

With “Page referrer” (located under “Behavior” in Google Optimize), you can target users arriving to your page through a specific source. For example, if you’re trying to test a new landing page for folks arriving via your blog, you can do that without creating a new URL; you could also serve the test only to folks coming in from a different website entirely.

With “Time since first arrival,” you can define how long a user must be on the website before the test fires in order to eliminate high-bounce sessions. And you can use JavaScript or information from your data layer to get even more granular with customers and their history on your site.

And if you’re lucky enough to have budget and need that justifies upgrading to Optimize 360, you can directly access all your Google Analytics audiences as a targeting segment.

8. Save your work

Seriously. Just do.

Optimize doesn’t have the same handy auto-save features as some of Google’s other products. If you close that window too early, kiss your test goodbye. You’ll be prompted to save if you’re trying to navigate back, but you’re SOL if you close all your tabs by accident.

Not that this has ever happened to us. Y’know, it just seems like it could be incredibly frustrating.

9. Use a script editor with script from the original website

Getting a little further into the nerdy technical best practices: When you create an experiment in Google Optimize you will have the option to work with a lot of code, and will frequently need to use it. When I first did an experiment through Optimize I had to start over at least three times because I forgot to use a script editor. Doing so keeps the code clean and accurate as you move it around.

We recommend inspecting the elements of normal, live, non-test pages on the site you’re working with and copying the code of elements you want to mimic into Atom or a similar editor.

At Portent we frequently use the script editor Atom, which is for Macs.

This means you don’t have to guess at the HTML for an element you want to create in your new design, and Atom keeps that code organized for you so you don’t make a mess of your Optimize layout. You can then paste that code right into your test design with the HTML.

Handy for not screwing up page layout, tables, image handling, etc.

10. Image hosting

Want to add an image to your test that doesn’t exist on the current website? There are two ways to do this.

Skipping ahead to the answer: The better way is to upload the image directly into the CMS of the site and link to that internal file. If you’re working for a client or you don’t have access to upload files to your site for whatever reason, an easy workaround is hosting your images on a free image hosting..

http://ift.tt/2ylUyzV

[vidmarket32514]

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

If you want a play-by-play guide on how to use Google Optimize, Google has a whole help center for that. But if you’ve been using Google Optimize for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of lessons that fall outside the purview of that help center. And you have to learn most of them the hard way.

The two of us have run a lot of tests with Google’s Optimize, and we’ve probably made a mistake with every single one of those tests. Excuse me, I mean we learned something new with every single one of those tests.

If you’re new to Google Optimize, here are 13 tips and tricks we’ve gathered from all those learning experiences. Hopefully this blog post can help you start running fast, effective, and revealing A/B tests in half the time it took us to learn these lessons.

1. Setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM)

First, the very technical groundwork.

To use Google Optimize you will first need to install the Optimize tag on your website. There are several different ways you could go about the installation. The good news for you is that we’ve tried them all and one approach stands out as the clear winner.

We strongly recommend that you set up Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager (GTM). It allows for the fastest, most consistent deployment across your entire site, and taking the time to set up Tag Manager will pay dividends in your productivity and flexibility down the road. If you’re new to tag management, on the fence, or you just want to get ahead of the game, check out the Portent post on common mistakes in Google Tag Manager.

Once you’re up and running, the good news is that GTM comes with a built-in tag for Google Optimize.

To get started, you’ll create a new tag in your account, then specify that you want the Google Optimize tag.

Next, you’ll need to paste in your Google Analytics ID into the corresponding box as your tracking ID. You’ll also paste the container ID into the Optimize Container ID box.

Finally, you’ll want to set up a trigger to fire on every page of your site (or just the pages you want to test with Google Optimize). This trigger should already be offered as an option if you follow this install method, so you’ll simply select it.

Once you have everything set up as described you will want to go into preview mode in GTM make sure your tag works where and how you intended. It should look something like this.

Once you confirm that the Optimize tag is firing correctly in preview mode you’ll publish the tag to your live site. Once done, you’re set to create your first experiment in Google Optimize. (But read the next few sections before you do.)

A quick warning: Unlike Google’s guide to deploying Optimize with Google Tag Manger, we do not recommend that you set up the tag to fire before your Google Analytics tag. Doing this can actually cause your Analytics tag not to fire on the page you are testing via Optimize. Translation: the order in which you run the test as the page loads could leave you blind to your actual traffic in some cases.

2. Look at your traffic to set timeline expectations

Before you ever run an experiment in Google Optimize, one of the first things you need to do is make sure that pages receives enough traffic to run the test in a timely fashion.

We’ve had plenty of occasions where a client has a hunch they’d love to test for an important page, often near the bottom of their conversion funnel. But on inspection we see that there’s so little traffic that declaring a statistically significant winner would take over a month. That may be fine depending on your situation, but it’s incredibly important to set expectations if your boss or your executive team are expecting answers quickly.

As a rule, we recommend you choose pages for tests that average at least 1,000 pageviews a month over the last 3 to 6 months. This will ensure that your experiment gets steady traffic and the experiment is able to complete in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Semi-Pro Tip: If there’s a page that absolutely positively must be tested quickly but it’s low traffic, consider whether you could use paid ads to drive the right kind of prospects to this page at a higher pace.

Create a situation that allows you to say “Yes, and here’s what we would need to do to accelerate the timeline.” Again, work with your paid search and/or remarketing experts to work out what kind of audience and approach would drive the right traffic to this page. Translation: prospects that are at a similar stage of their buyer’s journey to those who will see the page in the future. Few things are worse than explaining an experiment led to the wrong conclusion because of a self-inflicted anomaly with your traffic.

Rule of thumb: target pages with 1,000 or more monthly pageviews

See Section 5 for some related takeaways and a little more on this topic.

3. Create a test plan

One drawback of using the basic, free version of Google Optimize is that you’re unable to run more than three simultaneous tests. Three parallel tests should still give most marketers plenty of horsepower, however, and the best way to stretch this for maximum insight is to create a real test plan.

What’s in a test plan? Whatever you want, as long as it gives you direction, project scope, and a clear path to answering your bottom line business question. But here are some ideas to get you started:

Page title and URL

Test type

Hypothesis

Targeting

Description of changes or screenshot of mockup

Page traffic and time estimate

Funnel or persona target of page

A good test plan looks and acts kind of like an editorial calendar, or Agile project management roadmap. Keep a shared document to which your team can add ideas for future tests (icebox), and work at least two weeks ahead. Tests take about two weeks to complete, depending on traffic, and a deliberate schedule of rolling launches will make those three simultaneous tests feel like an army.

4. Use custom objectives

Data might not “lie,” but it can definitely mislead. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Here’s an example of two goals set up on a test: session duration, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Session duration is a metric option baked into Optimize; our MQL data was pulled from a custom objective we set in Google Analytics. As you can see, the new variant wildly outperformed the original page in session duration, but interestingly drove far fewer MQLs:

Comparing performance by MQL

Comparing performance on Session Duration

If we’d just been looking at session duration, we might think our new variant won. But because we had a critical custom objective in place, we could tell that the original was actually converting more effectively. In this case, taking the time to get our real business goals and KPIs into the test saved us from pushing a “winning” variant to our whole site, which ultimately would have meant losing business.

5. Optimize is perfect for testing PPC landing pages

One of the coolest things about Google Optimize is that you’re able to use your experiments for PPC landing pages.

Using Optimize for PPC landers is might be the fastest way to see quantifiable ROI from A/B testing. Landers are typically high-converting pages with a clear, easy-to-measure goal. You can run multivariate tests with different form lengths, CTAs, titles, and imagery to determine the perfect formula for a high-performing landing page.

Pro-Tip: Extend the value of your newfound knowledge about what’s most effective for your target audience by crafting a set of landing-page best practices specific to your customers and your business. Make sure the learnings hold up, and keep iterating through new tests to drive your conversion rates even higher.

6. Consider starting on desktop-only

At this point, it’s a given for most marketers that you need to optimize your site for mobile traffic if you have any meaningful component of mobile visitors, let alone Google’s Mobile-first Index. This absolutely extends to testing messaging or layout changes to make sure that results do not differ by context.

That said, when you’re unsure how a change in Google Optimize will affect your CSS or breakpoints for mobile devices, you absolutely need to check. In fact, you need to check the mobile view no matter what. Trust us on this.

Although services like Unbounce or Google Optimize do have tools that allow you some control over a test appearance in mobile, it can definitely be time-consuming to get them up to snuff. In some cases with Google Optimize, we’ve simply hit a brick wall with certain complex or highly customized client sites.

For example, even on our own site getting the mobile version of a test right takes some elbow grease. Here’s a visual of a test from Portent’s Content Services page in Optimize on desktop view:

Looks fine. Now here’s the mobile view:

Ooph.

A mess, right? This is really common with Optimize. When you start moving containers around and changing the padding, your test might look fine on desktop but the mobile or tablet version will be borderline unreadable.

You can either work on your design until it works well for all devices or change the device targeting to only display to desktop users, traffic permitting:

See Section 11 for more on the importance of doing your own quality assurance.

7. Make the most of targeting options

Of course, you can (and should) target users and test based on more than just device-type. You can target users only on specific browsers, in specific countries, or even specific cities. (Or you can exclude these localities—for example, how well does your Space Needle picture and Seattle branding test with audiences outside Washington State?)

With “Page referrer” (located under “Behavior” in Google Optimize), you can target users arriving to your page through a specific source. For example, if you’re trying to test a new landing page for folks arriving via your blog, you can do that without creating a new URL; you could also serve the test only to folks coming in from a different website entirely.

With “Time since first arrival,” you can define how long a user must be on the website before the test fires in order to eliminate high-bounce sessions. And you can use JavaScript or information from your data layer to get even more granular with customers and their history on your site.

And if you’re lucky enough to have budget and need that justifies upgrading to Optimize 360, you can directly access all your Google Analytics audiences as a targeting segment.

8. Save your work

Seriously. Just do.

Optimize doesn’t have the same handy auto-save features as some of Google’s other products. If you close that window too early, kiss your test goodbye. You’ll be prompted to save if you’re trying to navigate back, but you’re SOL if you close all your tabs by accident.

Not that this has ever happened to us. Y’know, it just seems like it could be incredibly frustrating.

9. Use a script editor with script from the original website

Getting a little further into the nerdy technical best practices: When you create an experiment in Google Optimize you will have the option to work with a lot of code, and will frequently need to use it. When I first did an experiment through Optimize I had to start over at least three times because I forgot to use a script editor. Doing so keeps the code clean and accurate as you move it around.

We recommend inspecting the elements of normal, live, non-test pages on the site you’re working with and copying the code of elements you want to mimic into Atom or a similar editor.

At Portent we frequently use the script editor Atom, which is for Macs.

This means you don’t have to guess at the HTML for an element you want to create in your new design, and Atom keeps that code organized for you so you don’t make a mess of your Optimize layout. You can then paste that code right into your test design with the HTML.

Handy for not screwing up page layout, tables, image handling, etc.

10. Image hosting

Want to add an image to your test that doesn’t exist on the current website? There are two ways to do this.

Skipping ahead to the answer: The better way is to upload the image directly into the CMS of the site and link to that internal file. If you’re working for a client or you don’t have access to upload files to your site for whatever reason, an easy workaround is hosting your images on a free image hosting..

http://ift.tt/2ylUyzV

[restatebrk24219]

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

If you want a play-by-play guide on how to use Google Optimize, Google has a whole help center for that. But if you’ve been using Google Optimize for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of lessons that fall outside the purview of that help center. And you have to learn most of them the hard way.

The two of us have run a lot of tests with Google’s Optimize, and we’ve probably made a mistake with every single one of those tests. Excuse me, I mean we learned something new with every single one of those tests.

If you’re new to Google Optimize, here are 13 tips and tricks we’ve gathered from all those learning experiences. Hopefully this blog post can help you start running fast, effective, and revealing A/B tests in half the time it took us to learn these lessons.

1. Setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM)

First, the very technical groundwork.

To use Google Optimize you will first need to install the Optimize tag on your website. There are several different ways you could go about the installation. The good news for you is that we’ve tried them all and one approach stands out as the clear winner.

We strongly recommend that you set up Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager (GTM). It allows for the fastest, most consistent deployment across your entire site, and taking the time to set up Tag Manager will pay dividends in your productivity and flexibility down the road. If you’re new to tag management, on the fence, or you just want to get ahead of the game, check out the Portent post on common mistakes in Google Tag Manager.

Once you’re up and running, the good news is that GTM comes with a built-in tag for Google Optimize.

To get started, you’ll create a new tag in your account, then specify that you want the Google Optimize tag.

Next, you’ll need to paste in your Google Analytics ID into the corresponding box as your tracking ID. You’ll also paste the container ID into the Optimize Container ID box.

Finally, you’ll want to set up a trigger to fire on every page of your site (or just the pages you want to test with Google Optimize). This trigger should already be offered as an option if you follow this install method, so you’ll simply select it.

Once you have everything set up as described you will want to go into preview mode in GTM make sure your tag works where and how you intended. It should look something like this.

Once you confirm that the Optimize tag is firing correctly in preview mode you’ll publish the tag to your live site. Once done, you’re set to create your first experiment in Google Optimize. (But read the next few sections before you do.)

A quick warning: Unlike Google’s guide to deploying Optimize with Google Tag Manger, we do not recommend that you set up the tag to fire before your Google Analytics tag. Doing this can actually cause your Analytics tag not to fire on the page you are testing via Optimize. Translation: the order in which you run the test as the page loads could leave you blind to your actual traffic in some cases.

2. Look at your traffic to set timeline expectations

Before you ever run an experiment in Google Optimize, one of the first things you need to do is make sure that pages receives enough traffic to run the test in a timely fashion.

We’ve had plenty of occasions where a client has a hunch they’d love to test for an important page, often near the bottom of their conversion funnel. But on inspection we see that there’s so little traffic that declaring a statistically significant winner would take over a month. That may be fine depending on your situation, but it’s incredibly important to set expectations if your boss or your executive team are expecting answers quickly.

As a rule, we recommend you choose pages for tests that average at least 1,000 pageviews a month over the last 3 to 6 months. This will ensure that your experiment gets steady traffic and the experiment is able to complete in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Semi-Pro Tip: If there’s a page that absolutely positively must be tested quickly but it’s low traffic, consider whether you could use paid ads to drive the right kind of prospects to this page at a higher pace.

Create a situation that allows you to say “Yes, and here’s what we would need to do to accelerate the timeline.” Again, work with your paid search and/or remarketing experts to work out what kind of audience and approach would drive the right traffic to this page. Translation: prospects that are at a similar stage of their buyer’s journey to those who will see the page in the future. Few things are worse than explaining an experiment led to the wrong conclusion because of a self-inflicted anomaly with your traffic.

Rule of thumb: target pages with 1,000 or more monthly pageviews

See Section 5 for some related takeaways and a little more on this topic.

3. Create a test plan

One drawback of using the basic, free version of Google Optimize is that you’re unable to run more than three simultaneous tests. Three parallel tests should still give most marketers plenty of horsepower, however, and the best way to stretch this for maximum insight is to create a real test plan.

What’s in a test plan? Whatever you want, as long as it gives you direction, project scope, and a clear path to answering your bottom line business question. But here are some ideas to get you started:

Page title and URL

Test type

Hypothesis

Targeting

Description of changes or screenshot of mockup

Page traffic and time estimate

Funnel or persona target of page

A good test plan looks and acts kind of like an editorial calendar, or Agile project management roadmap. Keep a shared document to which your team can add ideas for future tests (icebox), and work at least two weeks ahead. Tests take about two weeks to complete, depending on traffic, and a deliberate schedule of rolling launches will make those three simultaneous tests feel like an army.

4. Use custom objectives

Data might not “lie,” but it can definitely mislead. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Here’s an example of two goals set up on a test: session duration, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Session duration is a metric option baked into Optimize; our MQL data was pulled from a custom objective we set in Google Analytics. As you can see, the new variant wildly outperformed the original page in session duration, but interestingly drove far fewer MQLs:

Comparing performance by MQL

Comparing performance on Session Duration

If we’d just been looking at session duration, we might think our new variant won. But because we had a critical custom objective in place, we could tell that the original was actually converting more effectively. In this case, taking the time to get our real business goals and KPIs into the test saved us from pushing a “winning” variant to our whole site, which ultimately would have meant losing business.

5. Optimize is perfect for testing PPC landing pages

One of the coolest things about Google Optimize is that you’re able to use your experiments for PPC landing pages.

Using Optimize for PPC landers is might be the fastest way to see quantifiable ROI from A/B testing. Landers are typically high-converting pages with a clear, easy-to-measure goal. You can run multivariate tests with different form lengths, CTAs, titles, and imagery to determine the perfect formula for a high-performing landing page.

Pro-Tip: Extend the value of your newfound knowledge about what’s most effective for your target audience by crafting a set of landing-page best practices specific to your customers and your business. Make sure the learnings hold up, and keep iterating through new tests to drive your conversion rates even higher.

6. Consider starting on desktop-only

At this point, it’s a given for most marketers that you need to optimize your site for mobile traffic if you have any meaningful component of mobile visitors, let alone Google’s Mobile-first Index. This absolutely extends to testing messaging or layout changes to make sure that results do not differ by context.

That said, when you’re unsure how a change in Google Optimize will affect your CSS or breakpoints for mobile devices, you absolutely need to check. In fact, you need to check the mobile view no matter what. Trust us on this.

Although services like Unbounce or Google Optimize do have tools that allow you some control over a test appearance in mobile, it can definitely be time-consuming to get them up to snuff. In some cases with Google Optimize, we’ve simply hit a brick wall with certain complex or highly customized client sites.

For example, even on our own site getting the mobile version of a test right takes some elbow grease. Here’s a visual of a test from Portent’s Content Services page in Optimize on desktop view:

Looks fine. Now here’s the mobile view:

Ooph.

A mess, right? This is really common with Optimize. When you start moving containers around and changing the padding, your test might look fine on desktop but the mobile or tablet version will be borderline unreadable.

You can either work on your design until it works well for all devices or change the device targeting to only display to desktop users, traffic permitting:

See Section 11 for more on the importance of doing your own quality assurance.

7. Make the most of targeting options

Of course, you can (and should) target users and test based on more than just device-type. You can target users only on specific browsers, in specific countries, or even specific cities. (Or you can exclude these localities—for example, how well does your Space Needle picture and Seattle branding test with audiences outside Washington State?)

With “Page referrer” (located under “Behavior” in Google Optimize), you can target users arriving to your page through a specific source. For example, if you’re trying to test a new landing page for folks arriving via your blog, you can do that without creating a new URL; you could also serve the test only to folks coming in from a different website entirely.

With “Time since first arrival,” you can define how long a user must be on the website before the test fires in order to eliminate high-bounce sessions. And you can use JavaScript or information from your data layer to get even more granular with customers and their history on your site.

And if you’re lucky enough to have budget and need that justifies upgrading to Optimize 360, you can directly access all your Google Analytics audiences as a targeting segment.

8. Save your work

Seriously. Just do.

Optimize doesn’t have the same handy auto-save features as some of Google’s other products. If you close that window too early, kiss your test goodbye. You’ll be prompted to save if you’re trying to navigate back, but you’re SOL if you close all your tabs by accident.

Not that this has ever happened to us. Y’know, it just seems like it could be incredibly frustrating.

9. Use a script editor with script from the original website

Getting a little further into the nerdy technical best practices: When you create an experiment in Google Optimize you will have the option to work with a lot of code, and will frequently need to use it. When I first did an experiment through Optimize I had to start over at least three times because I forgot to use a script editor. Doing so keeps the code clean and accurate as you move it around.

We recommend inspecting the elements of normal, live, non-test pages on the site you’re working with and copying the code of elements you want to mimic into Atom or a similar editor.

At Portent we frequently use the script editor Atom, which is for Macs.

This means you don’t have to guess at the HTML for an element you want to create in your new design, and Atom keeps that code organized for you so you don’t make a mess of your Optimize layout. You can then paste that code right into your test design with the HTML.

Handy for not screwing up page layout, tables, image handling, etc.

10. Image hosting

Want to add an image to your test that doesn’t exist on the current website? There are two ways to do this.

Skipping ahead to the answer: The better way is to upload the image directly into the CMS of the site and link to that internal file. If you’re working for a client or you don’t have access to upload files to your site for whatever reason, an easy workaround is hosting your images on a free image hosting..

http://ift.tt/2ylUyzV

[seo90210]

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

If you want a play-by-play guide on how to use Google Optimize, Google has a whole help center for that. But if you’ve been using Google Optimize for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of lessons that fall outside the purview of that help center. And you have to learn most of them the hard way.

The two of us have run a lot of tests with Google’s Optimize, and we’ve probably made a mistake with every single one of those tests. Excuse me, I mean we learned something new with every single one of those tests.

If you’re new to Google Optimize, here are 13 tips and tricks we’ve gathered from all those learning experiences. Hopefully this blog post can help you start running fast, effective, and revealing A/B tests in half the time it took us to learn these lessons.

1. Setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM)

First, the very technical groundwork.

To use Google Optimize you will first need to install the Optimize tag on your website. There are several different ways you could go about the installation. The good news for you is that we’ve tried them all and one approach stands out as the clear winner.

We strongly recommend that you set up Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager (GTM). It allows for the fastest, most consistent deployment across your entire site, and taking the time to set up Tag Manager will pay dividends in your productivity and flexibility down the road. If you’re new to tag management, on the fence, or you just want to get ahead of the game, check out the Portent post on common mistakes in Google Tag Manager.

Once you’re up and running, the good news is that GTM comes with a built-in tag for Google Optimize.

To get started, you’ll create a new tag in your account, then specify that you want the Google Optimize tag.

Next, you’ll need to paste in your Google Analytics ID into the corresponding box as your tracking ID. You’ll also paste the container ID into the Optimize Container ID box.

Finally, you’ll want to set up a trigger to fire on every page of your site (or just the pages you want to test with Google Optimize). This trigger should already be offered as an option if you follow this install method, so you’ll simply select it.

Once you have everything set up as described you will want to go into preview mode in GTM make sure your tag works where and how you intended. It should look something like this.

Once you confirm that the Optimize tag is firing correctly in preview mode you’ll publish the tag to your live site. Once done, you’re set to create your first experiment in Google Optimize. (But read the next few sections before you do.)

A quick warning: Unlike Google’s guide to deploying Optimize with Google Tag Manger, we do not recommend that you set up the tag to fire before your Google Analytics tag. Doing this can actually cause your Analytics tag not to fire on the page you are testing via Optimize. Translation: the order in which you run the test as the page loads could leave you blind to your actual traffic in some cases.

2. Look at your traffic to set timeline expectations

Before you ever run an experiment in Google Optimize, one of the first things you need to do is make sure that pages receives enough traffic to run the test in a timely fashion.

We’ve had plenty of occasions where a client has a hunch they’d love to test for an important page, often near the bottom of their conversion funnel. But on inspection we see that there’s so little traffic that declaring a statistically significant winner would take over a month. That may be fine depending on your situation, but it’s incredibly important to set expectations if your boss or your executive team are expecting answers quickly.

As a rule, we recommend you choose pages for tests that average at least 1,000 pageviews a month over the last 3 to 6 months. This will ensure that your experiment gets steady traffic and the experiment is able to complete in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Semi-Pro Tip: If there’s a page that absolutely positively must be tested quickly but it’s low traffic, consider whether you could use paid ads to drive the right kind of prospects to this page at a higher pace.

Create a situation that allows you to say “Yes, and here’s what we would need to do to accelerate the timeline.” Again, work with your paid search and/or remarketing experts to work out what kind of audience and approach would drive the right traffic to this page. Translation: prospects that are at a similar stage of their buyer’s journey to those who will see the page in the future. Few things are worse than explaining an experiment led to the wrong conclusion because of a self-inflicted anomaly with your traffic.

Rule of thumb: target pages with 1,000 or more monthly pageviews

See Section 5 for some related takeaways and a little more on this topic.

3. Create a test plan

One drawback of using the basic, free version of Google Optimize is that you’re unable to run more than three simultaneous tests. Three parallel tests should still give most marketers plenty of horsepower, however, and the best way to stretch this for maximum insight is to create a real test plan.

What’s in a test plan? Whatever you want, as long as it gives you direction, project scope, and a clear path to answering your bottom line business question. But here are some ideas to get you started:

Page title and URL

Test type

Hypothesis

Targeting

Description of changes or screenshot of mockup

Page traffic and time estimate

Funnel or persona target of page

A good test plan looks and acts kind of like an editorial calendar, or Agile project management roadmap. Keep a shared document to which your team can add ideas for future tests (icebox), and work at least two weeks ahead. Tests take about two weeks to complete, depending on traffic, and a deliberate schedule of rolling launches will make those three simultaneous tests feel like an army.

4. Use custom objectives

Data might not “lie,” but it can definitely mislead. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Here’s an example of two goals set up on a test: session duration, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Session duration is a metric option baked into Optimize; our MQL data was pulled from a custom objective we set in Google Analytics. As you can see, the new variant wildly outperformed the original page in session duration, but interestingly drove far fewer MQLs:

Comparing performance by MQL

Comparing performance on Session Duration

If we’d just been looking at session duration, we might think our new variant won. But because we had a critical custom objective in place, we could tell that the original was actually converting more effectively. In this case, taking the time to get our real business goals and KPIs into the test saved us from pushing a “winning” variant to our whole site, which ultimately would have meant losing business.

5. Optimize is perfect for testing PPC landing pages

One of the coolest things about Google Optimize is that you’re able to use your experiments for PPC landing pages.

Using Optimize for PPC landers is might be the fastest way to see quantifiable ROI from A/B testing. Landers are typically high-converting pages with a clear, easy-to-measure goal. You can run multivariate tests with different form lengths, CTAs, titles, and imagery to determine the perfect formula for a high-performing landing page.

Pro-Tip: Extend the value of your newfound knowledge about what’s most effective for your target audience by crafting a set of landing-page best practices specific to your customers and your business. Make sure the learnings hold up, and keep iterating through new tests to drive your conversion rates even higher.

6. Consider starting on desktop-only

At this point, it’s a given for most marketers that you need to optimize your site for mobile traffic if you have any meaningful component of mobile visitors, let alone Google’s Mobile-first Index. This absolutely extends to testing messaging or layout changes to make sure that results do not differ by context.

That said, when you’re unsure how a change in Google Optimize will affect your CSS or breakpoints for mobile devices, you absolutely need to check. In fact, you need to check the mobile view no matter what. Trust us on this.

Although services like Unbounce or Google Optimize do have tools that allow you some control over a test appearance in mobile, it can definitely be time-consuming to get them up to snuff. In some cases with Google Optimize, we’ve simply hit a brick wall with certain complex or highly customized client sites.

For example, even on our own site getting the mobile version of a test right takes some elbow grease. Here’s a visual of a test from Portent’s Content Services page in Optimize on desktop view:

Looks fine. Now here’s the mobile view:

Ooph.

A mess, right? This is really common with Optimize. When you start moving containers around and changing the padding, your test might look fine on desktop but the mobile or tablet version will be borderline unreadable.

You can either work on your design until it works well for all devices or change the device targeting to only display to desktop users, traffic permitting:

See Section 11 for more on the importance of doing your own quality assurance.

7. Make the most of targeting options

Of course, you can (and should) target users and test based on more than just device-type. You can target users only on specific browsers, in specific countries, or even specific cities. (Or you can exclude these localities—for example, how well does your Space Needle picture and Seattle branding test with audiences outside Washington State?)

With “Page referrer” (located under “Behavior” in Google Optimize), you can target users arriving to your page through a specific source. For example, if you’re trying to test a new landing page for folks arriving via your blog, you can do that without creating a new URL; you could also serve the test only to folks coming in from a different website entirely.

With “Time since first arrival,” you can define how long a user must be on the website before the test fires in order to eliminate high-bounce sessions. And you can use JavaScript or information from your data layer to get even more granular with customers and their history on your site.

And if you’re lucky enough to have budget and need that justifies upgrading to Optimize 360, you can directly access all your Google Analytics audiences as a targeting segment.

8. Save your work

Seriously. Just do.

Optimize doesn’t have the same handy auto-save features as some of Google’s other products. If you close that window too early, kiss your test goodbye. You’ll be prompted to save if you’re trying to navigate back, but you’re SOL if you close all your tabs by accident.

Not that this has ever happened to us. Y’know, it just seems like it could be incredibly frustrating.

9. Use a script editor with script from the original website

Getting a little further into the nerdy technical best practices: When you create an experiment in Google Optimize you will have the option to work with a lot of code, and will frequently need to use it. When I first did an experiment through Optimize I had to start over at least three times because I forgot to use a script editor. Doing so keeps the code clean and accurate as you move it around.

We recommend inspecting the elements of normal, live, non-test pages on the site you’re working with and copying the code of elements you want to mimic into Atom or a similar editor.

At Portent we frequently use the script editor Atom, which is for Macs.

This means you don’t have to guess at the HTML for an element you want to create in your new design, and Atom keeps that code organized for you so you don’t make a mess of your Optimize layout. You can then paste that code right into your test design with the HTML.

Handy for not screwing up page layout, tables, image handling, etc.

10. Image hosting

Want to add an image to your test that doesn’t exist on the current website? There are two ways to do this.

Skipping ahead to the answer: The better way is to upload the image directly into the CMS of the site and link to that internal file. If you’re working for a client or you don’t have access to upload files to your site for whatever reason, an easy workaround is hosting your images on a free image hosting..

from FEED 9 MARKETING http://ift.tt/2ylUyzV

[constructionsworkr3053]

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

If you want a play-by-play guide on how to use Google Optimize, Google has a whole help center for that. But if you’ve been using Google Optimize for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of lessons that fall outside the purview of that help center. And you have to learn most of them the hard way.

The two of us have run a lot of tests with Google’s Optimize, and we’ve probably made a mistake with every single one of those tests. Excuse me, I mean we learned something new with every single one of those tests.

If you’re new to Google Optimize, here are 13 tips and tricks we’ve gathered from all those learning experiences. Hopefully this blog post can help you start running fast, effective, and revealing A/B tests in half the time it took us to learn these lessons.

1. Setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM)

First, the very technical groundwork.

To use Google Optimize you will first need to install the Optimize tag on your website. There are several different ways you could go about the installation. The good news for you is that we’ve tried them all and one approach stands out as the clear winner.

We strongly recommend that you set up Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager (GTM). It allows for the fastest, most consistent deployment across your entire site, and taking the time to set up Tag Manager will pay dividends in your productivity and flexibility down the road. If you’re new to tag management, on the fence, or you just want to get ahead of the game, check out the Portent post on common mistakes in Google Tag Manager.

Once you’re up and running, the good news is that GTM comes with a built-in tag for Google Optimize.

To get started, you’ll create a new tag in your account, then specify that you want the Google Optimize tag.

Next, you’ll need to paste in your Google Analytics ID into the corresponding box as your tracking ID. You’ll also paste the container ID into the Optimize Container ID box.

Finally, you’ll want to set up a trigger to fire on every page of your site (or just the pages you want to test with Google Optimize). This trigger should already be offered as an option if you follow this install method, so you’ll simply select it.

Once you have everything set up as described you will want to go into preview mode in GTM make sure your tag works where and how you intended. It should look something like this.

Once you confirm that the Optimize tag is firing correctly in preview mode you’ll publish the tag to your live site. Once done, you’re set to create your first experiment in Google Optimize. (But read the next few sections before you do.)

A quick warning: Unlike Google’s guide to deploying Optimize with Google Tag Manger, we do not recommend that you set up the tag to fire before your Google Analytics tag. Doing this can actually cause your Analytics tag not to fire on the page you are testing via Optimize. Translation: the order in which you run the test as the page loads could leave you blind to your actual traffic in some cases.

2. Look at your traffic to set timeline expectations

Before you ever run an experiment in Google Optimize, one of the first things you need to do is make sure that pages receives enough traffic to run the test in a timely fashion.

We’ve had plenty of occasions where a client has a hunch they’d love to test for an important page, often near the bottom of their conversion funnel. But on inspection we see that there’s so little traffic that declaring a statistically significant winner would take over a month. That may be fine depending on your situation, but it’s incredibly important to set expectations if your boss or your executive team are expecting answers quickly.

As a rule, we recommend you choose pages for tests that average at least 1,000 pageviews a month over the last 3 to 6 months. This will ensure that your experiment gets steady traffic and the experiment is able to complete in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Semi-Pro Tip: If there’s a page that absolutely positively must be tested quickly but it’s low traffic, consider whether you could use paid ads to drive the right kind of prospects to this page at a higher pace.

Create a situation that allows you to say “Yes, and here’s what we would need to do to accelerate the timeline.” Again, work with your paid search and/or remarketing experts to work out what kind of audience and approach would drive the right traffic to this page. Translation: prospects that are at a similar stage of their buyer’s journey to those who will see the page in the future. Few things are worse than explaining an experiment led to the wrong conclusion because of a self-inflicted anomaly with your traffic.

Rule of thumb: target pages with 1,000 or more monthly pageviews

See Section 5 for some related takeaways and a little more on this topic.

3. Create a test plan

One drawback of using the basic, free version of Google Optimize is that you’re unable to run more than three simultaneous tests. Three parallel tests should still give most marketers plenty of horsepower, however, and the best way to stretch this for maximum insight is to create a real test plan.

What’s in a test plan? Whatever you want, as long as it gives you direction, project scope, and a clear path to answering your bottom line business question. But here are some ideas to get you started:

Page title and URL

Test type

Hypothesis

Targeting

Description of changes or screenshot of mockup

Page traffic and time estimate

Funnel or persona target of page

A good test plan looks and acts kind of like an editorial calendar, or Agile project management roadmap. Keep a shared document to which your team can add ideas for future tests (icebox), and work at least two weeks ahead. Tests take about two weeks to complete, depending on traffic, and a deliberate schedule of rolling launches will make those three simultaneous tests feel like an army.

4. Use custom objectives

Data might not “lie,” but it can definitely mislead. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Here’s an example of two goals set up on a test: session duration, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Session duration is a metric option baked into Optimize; our MQL data was pulled from a custom objective we set in Google Analytics. As you can see, the new variant wildly outperformed the original page in session duration, but interestingly drove far fewer MQLs:

Comparing performance by MQL

Comparing performance on Session Duration

If we’d just been looking at session duration, we might think our new variant won. But because we had a critical custom objective in place, we could tell that the original was actually converting more effectively. In this case, taking the time to get our real business goals and KPIs into the test saved us from pushing a “winning” variant to our whole site, which ultimately would have meant losing business.

5. Optimize is perfect for testing PPC landing pages

One of the coolest things about Google Optimize is that you’re able to use your experiments for PPC landing pages.

Using Optimize for PPC landers is might be the fastest way to see quantifiable ROI from A/B testing. Landers are typically high-converting pages with a clear, easy-to-measure goal. You can run multivariate tests with different form lengths, CTAs, titles, and imagery to determine the perfect formula for a high-performing landing page.

Pro-Tip: Extend the value of your newfound knowledge about what’s most effective for your target audience by crafting a set of landing-page best practices specific to your customers and your business. Make sure the learnings hold up, and keep iterating through new tests to drive your conversion rates even higher.

6. Consider starting on desktop-only

At this point, it’s a given for most marketers that you need to optimize your site for mobile traffic if you have any meaningful component of mobile visitors, let alone Google’s Mobile-first Index. This absolutely extends to testing messaging or layout changes to make sure that results do not differ by context.

That said, when you’re unsure how a change in Google Optimize will affect your CSS or breakpoints for mobile devices, you absolutely need to check. In fact, you need to check the mobile view no matter what. Trust us on this.

Although services like Unbounce or Google Optimize do have tools that allow you some control over a test appearance in mobile, it can definitely be time-consuming to get them up to snuff. In some cases with Google Optimize, we’ve simply hit a brick wall with certain complex or highly customized client sites.

For example, even on our own site getting the mobile version of a test right takes some elbow grease. Here’s a visual of a test from Portent’s Content Services page in Optimize on desktop view:

Looks fine. Now here’s the mobile view:

Ooph.

A mess, right? This is really common with Optimize. When you start moving containers around and changing the padding, your test might look fine on desktop but the mobile or tablet version will be borderline unreadable.

You can either work on your design until it works well for all devices or change the device targeting to only display to desktop users, traffic permitting:

See Section 11 for more on the importance of doing your own quality assurance.

7. Make the most of targeting options

Of course, you can (and should) target users and test based on more than just device-type. You can target users only on specific browsers, in specific countries, or even specific cities. (Or you can exclude these localities—for example, how well does your Space Needle picture and Seattle branding test with audiences outside Washington State?)

With “Page referrer” (located under “Behavior” in Google Optimize), you can target users arriving to your page through a specific source. For example, if you’re trying to test a new landing page for folks arriving via your blog, you can do that without creating a new URL; you could also serve the test only to folks coming in from a different website entirely.

With “Time since first arrival,” you can define how long a user must be on the website before the test fires in order to eliminate high-bounce sessions. And you can use JavaScript or information from your data layer to get even more granular with customers and their history on your site.

And if you’re lucky enough to have budget and need that justifies upgrading to Optimize 360, you can directly access all your Google Analytics audiences as a targeting segment.

8. Save your work

Seriously. Just do.

Optimize doesn’t have the same handy auto-save features as some of Google’s other products. If you close that window too early, kiss your test goodbye. You’ll be prompted to save if you’re trying to navigate back, but you’re SOL if you close all your tabs by accident.

Not that this has ever happened to us. Y’know, it just seems like it could be incredibly frustrating.

9. Use a script editor with script from the original website

Getting a little further into the nerdy technical best practices: When you create an experiment in Google Optimize you will have the option to work with a lot of code, and will frequently need to use it. When I first did an experiment through Optimize I had to start over at least three times because I forgot to use a script editor. Doing so keeps the code clean and accurate as you move it around.

We recommend inspecting the elements of normal, live, non-test pages on the site you’re working with and copying the code of elements you want to mimic into Atom or a similar editor.

At Portent we frequently use the script editor Atom, which is for Macs.

This means you don’t have to guess at the HTML for an element you want to create in your new design, and Atom keeps that code organized for you so you don’t make a mess of your Optimize layout. You can then paste that code right into your test design with the HTML.

Handy for not screwing up page layout, tables, image handling, etc.

10. Image hosting

Want to add an image to your test that doesn’t exist on the current website? There are two ways to do this.

Skipping ahead to the answer: The better way is to upload the image directly into the CMS of the site and link to that internal file. If you’re working for a client or you don’t have access to upload files to your site for whatever reason, an easy workaround is hosting your images on a free image hosting..

http://ift.tt/2ylUyzV

[seopt58147]

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

If you want a play-by-play guide on how to use Google Optimize, Google has a whole help center for that. But if you’ve been using Google Optimize for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of lessons that fall outside the purview of that help center. And you have to learn most of them the hard way.

The two of us have run a lot of tests with Google’s Optimize, and we’ve probably made a mistake with every single one of those tests. Excuse me, I mean we learned something new with every single one of those tests.

If you’re new to Google Optimize, here are 13 tips and tricks we’ve gathered from all those learning experiences. Hopefully this blog post can help you start running fast, effective, and revealing A/B tests in half the time it took us to learn these lessons.

1. Setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM)

First, the very technical groundwork.

To use Google Optimize you will first need to install the Optimize tag on your website. There are several different ways you could go about the installation. The good news for you is that we’ve tried them all and one approach stands out as the clear winner.

We strongly recommend that you set up Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager (GTM). It allows for the fastest, most consistent deployment across your entire site, and taking the time to set up Tag Manager will pay dividends in your productivity and flexibility down the road. If you’re new to tag management, on the fence, or you just want to get ahead of the game, check out the Portent post on common mistakes in Google Tag Manager.

Once you’re up and running, the good news is that GTM comes with a built-in tag for Google Optimize.

To get started, you’ll create a new tag in your account, then specify that you want the Google Optimize tag.

Next, you’ll need to paste in your Google Analytics ID into the corresponding box as your tracking ID. You’ll also paste the container ID into the Optimize Container ID box.

Finally, you’ll want to set up a trigger to fire on every page of your site (or just the pages you want to test with Google Optimize). This trigger should already be offered as an option if you follow this install method, so you’ll simply select it.

Once you have everything set up as described you will want to go into preview mode in GTM make sure your tag works where and how you intended. It should look something like this.

Once you confirm that the Optimize tag is firing correctly in preview mode you’ll publish the tag to your live site. Once done, you’re set to create your first experiment in Google Optimize. (But read the next few sections before you do.)

A quick warning: Unlike Google’s guide to deploying Optimize with Google Tag Manger, we do not recommend that you set up the tag to fire before your Google Analytics tag. Doing this can actually cause your Analytics tag not to fire on the page you are testing via Optimize. Translation: the order in which you run the test as the page loads could leave you blind to your actual traffic in some cases.

2. Look at your traffic to set timeline expectations

Before you ever run an experiment in Google Optimize, one of the first things you need to do is make sure that pages receives enough traffic to run the test in a timely fashion.

We’ve had plenty of occasions where a client has a hunch they’d love to test for an important page, often near the bottom of their conversion funnel. But on inspection we see that there’s so little traffic that declaring a statistically significant winner would take over a month. That may be fine depending on your situation, but it’s incredibly important to set expectations if your boss or your executive team are expecting answers quickly.

As a rule, we recommend you choose pages for tests that average at least 1,000 pageviews a month over the last 3 to 6 months. This will ensure that your experiment gets steady traffic and the experiment is able to complete in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Semi-Pro Tip: If there’s a page that absolutely positively must be tested quickly but it’s low traffic, consider whether you could use paid ads to drive the right kind of prospects to this page at a higher pace.

Create a situation that allows you to say “Yes, and here’s what we would need to do to accelerate the timeline.” Again, work with your paid search and/or remarketing experts to work out what kind of audience and approach would drive the right traffic to this page. Translation: prospects that are at a similar stage of their buyer’s journey to those who will see the page in the future. Few things are worse than explaining an experiment led to the wrong conclusion because of a self-inflicted anomaly with your traffic.

Rule of thumb: target pages with 1,000 or more monthly pageviews

See Section 5 for some related takeaways and a little more on this topic.

3. Create a test plan

One drawback of using the basic, free version of Google Optimize is that you’re unable to run more than three simultaneous tests. Three parallel tests should still give most marketers plenty of horsepower, however, and the best way to stretch this for maximum insight is to create a real test plan.

What’s in a test plan? Whatever you want, as long as it gives you direction, project scope, and a clear path to answering your bottom line business question. But here are some ideas to get you started:

Page title and URL

Test type

Hypothesis

Targeting

Description of changes or screenshot of mockup

Page traffic and time estimate

Funnel or persona target of page

A good test plan looks and acts kind of like an editorial calendar, or Agile project management roadmap. Keep a shared document to which your team can add ideas for future tests (icebox), and work at least two weeks ahead. Tests take about two weeks to complete, depending on traffic, and a deliberate schedule of rolling launches will make those three simultaneous tests feel like an army.

4. Use custom objectives

Data might not “lie,” but it can definitely mislead. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Here’s an example of two goals set up on a test: session duration, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Session duration is a metric option baked into Optimize; our MQL data was pulled from a custom objective we set in Google Analytics. As you can see, the new variant wildly outperformed the original page in session duration, but interestingly drove far fewer MQLs:

Comparing performance by MQL

Comparing performance on Session Duration

If we’d just been looking at session duration, we might think our new variant won. But because we had a critical custom objective in place, we could tell that the original was actually converting more effectively. In this case, taking the time to get our real business goals and KPIs into the test saved us from pushing a “winning” variant to our whole site, which ultimately would have meant losing business.

5. Optimize is perfect for testing PPC landing pages

One of the coolest things about Google Optimize is that you’re able to use your experiments for PPC landing pages.

Using Optimize for PPC landers is might be the fastest way to see quantifiable ROI from A/B testing. Landers are typically high-converting pages with a clear, easy-to-measure goal. You can run multivariate tests with different form lengths, CTAs, titles, and imagery to determine the perfect formula for a high-performing landing page.

Pro-Tip: Extend the value of your newfound knowledge about what’s most effective for your target audience by crafting a set of landing-page best practices specific to your customers and your business. Make sure the learnings hold up, and keep iterating through new tests to drive your conversion rates even higher.

6. Consider starting on desktop-only

At this point, it’s a given for most marketers that you need to optimize your site for mobile traffic if you have any meaningful component of mobile visitors, let alone Google’s Mobile-first Index. This absolutely extends to testing messaging or layout changes to make sure that results do not differ by context.

That said, when you’re unsure how a change in Google Optimize will affect your CSS or breakpoints for mobile devices, you absolutely need to check. In fact, you need to check the mobile view no matter what. Trust us on this.

Although services like Unbounce or Google Optimize do have tools that allow you some control over a test appearance in mobile, it can definitely be time-consuming to get them up to snuff. In some cases with Google Optimize, we’ve simply hit a brick wall with certain complex or highly customized client sites.

For example, even on our own site getting the mobile version of a test right takes some elbow grease. Here’s a visual of a test from Portent’s Content Services page in Optimize on desktop view:

Looks fine. Now here’s the mobile view:

Ooph.

A mess, right? This is really common with Optimize. When you start moving containers around and changing the padding, your test might look fine on desktop but the mobile or tablet version will be borderline unreadable.

You can either work on your design until it works well for all devices or change the device targeting to only display to desktop users, traffic permitting:

See Section 11 for more on the importance of doing your own quality assurance.

7. Make the most of targeting options

Of course, you can (and should) target users and test based on more than just device-type. You can target users only on specific browsers, in specific countries, or even specific cities. (Or you can exclude these localities—for example, how well does your Space Needle picture and Seattle branding test with audiences outside Washington State?)

With “Page referrer” (located under “Behavior” in Google Optimize), you can target users arriving to your page through a specific source. For example, if you’re trying to test a new landing page for folks arriving via your blog, you can do that without creating a new URL; you could also serve the test only to folks coming in from a different website entirely.

With “Time since first arrival,” you can define how long a user must be on the website before the test fires in order to eliminate high-bounce sessions. And you can use JavaScript or information from your data layer to get even more granular with customers and their history on your site.

And if you’re lucky enough to have budget and need that justifies upgrading to Optimize 360, you can directly access all your Google Analytics audiences as a targeting segment.

8. Save your work

Seriously. Just do.

Optimize doesn’t have the same handy auto-save features as some of Google’s other products. If you close that window too early, kiss your test goodbye. You’ll be prompted to save if you’re trying to navigate back, but you’re SOL if you close all your tabs by accident.

Not that this has ever happened to us. Y’know, it just seems like it could be incredibly frustrating.

9. Use a script editor with script from the original website

Getting a little further into the nerdy technical best practices: When you create an experiment in Google Optimize you will have the option to work with a lot of code, and will frequently need to use it. When I first did an experiment through Optimize I had to start over at least three times because I forgot to use a script editor. Doing so keeps the code clean and accurate as you move it around.

We recommend inspecting the elements of normal, live, non-test pages on the site you’re working with and copying the code of elements you want to mimic into Atom or a similar editor.

At Portent we frequently use the script editor Atom, which is for Macs.

This means you don’t have to guess at the HTML for an element you want to create in your new design, and Atom keeps that code organized for you so you don’t make a mess of your Optimize layout. You can then paste that code right into your test design with the HTML.

Handy for not screwing up page layout, tables, image handling, etc.

10. Image hosting

Want to add an image to your test that doesn’t exist on the current website? There are two ways to do this.

Skipping ahead to the answer: The better way is to upload the image directly into the CMS of the site and link to that internal file. If you’re working for a client or you don’t have access to upload files to your site for whatever reason, an easy workaround is hosting your images on a free image hosting..

http://ift.tt/2ylUyzV

[seo19107]

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

13 Tips for Using Google Optimize if You’re Not a Developer

If you want a play-by-play guide on how to use Google Optimize, Google has a whole help center for that. But if you’ve been using Google Optimize for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of lessons that fall outside the purview of that help center. And you have to learn most of them the hard way.

The two of us have run a lot of tests with Google’s Optimize, and we’ve probably made a mistake with every single one of those tests. Excuse me, I mean we learned something new with every single one of those tests.

If you’re new to Google Optimize, here are 13 tips and tricks we’ve gathered from all those learning experiences. Hopefully this blog post can help you start running fast, effective, and revealing A/B tests in half the time it took us to learn these lessons.

1. Setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM)

First, the very technical groundwork.

To use Google Optimize you will first need to install the Optimize tag on your website. There are several different ways you could go about the installation. The good news for you is that we’ve tried them all and one approach stands out as the clear winner.

We strongly recommend that you set up Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager (GTM). It allows for the fastest, most consistent deployment across your entire site, and taking the time to set up Tag Manager will pay dividends in your productivity and flexibility down the road. If you’re new to tag management, on the fence, or you just want to get ahead of the game, check out the Portent post on common mistakes in Google Tag Manager.

Once you’re up and running, the good news is that GTM comes with a built-in tag for Google Optimize.

To get started, you’ll create a new tag in your account, then specify that you want the Google Optimize tag.

Next, you’ll need to paste in your Google Analytics ID into the corresponding box as your tracking ID. You’ll also paste the container ID into the Optimize Container ID box.

Finally, you’ll want to set up a trigger to fire on every page of your site (or just the pages you want to test with Google Optimize). This trigger should already be offered as an option if you follow this install method, so you’ll simply select it.

Once you have everything set up as described you will want to go into preview mode in GTM make sure your tag works where and how you intended. It should look something like this.

Once you confirm that the Optimize tag is firing correctly in preview mode you’ll publish the tag to your live site. Once done, you’re set to create your first experiment in Google Optimize. (But read the next few sections before you do.)

A quick warning: Unlike Google’s guide to deploying Optimize with Google Tag Manger, we do not recommend that you set up the tag to fire before your Google Analytics tag. Doing this can actually cause your Analytics tag not to fire on the page you are testing via Optimize. Translation: the order in which you run the test as the page loads could leave you blind to your actual traffic in some cases.

2. Look at your traffic to set timeline expectations

Before you ever run an experiment in Google Optimize, one of the first things you need to do is make sure that pages receives enough traffic to run the test in a timely fashion.

We’ve had plenty of occasions where a client has a hunch they’d love to test for an important page, often near the bottom of their conversion funnel. But on inspection we see that there’s so little traffic that declaring a statistically significant winner would take over a month. That may be fine depending on your situation, but it’s incredibly important to set expectations if your boss or your executive team are expecting answers quickly.

As a rule, we recommend you choose pages for tests that average at least 1,000 pageviews a month over the last 3 to 6 months. This will ensure that your experiment gets steady traffic and the experiment is able to complete in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Semi-Pro Tip: If there’s a page that absolutely positively must be tested quickly but it’s low traffic, consider whether you could use paid ads to drive the right kind of prospects to this page at a higher pace.

Create a situation that allows you to say “Yes, and here’s what we would need to do to accelerate the timeline.” Again, work with your paid search and/or remarketing experts to work out what kind of audience and approach would drive the right traffic to this page. Translation: prospects that are at a similar stage of their buyer’s journey to those who will see the page in the future. Few things are worse than explaining an experiment led to the wrong conclusion because of a self-inflicted anomaly with your traffic.

Rule of thumb: target pages with 1,000 or more monthly pageviews

See Section 5 for some related takeaways and a little more on this topic.

3. Create a test plan

One drawback of using the basic, free version of Google Optimize is that you’re unable to run more than three simultaneous tests. Three parallel tests should still give most marketers plenty of horsepower, however, and the best way to stretch this for maximum insight is to create a real test plan.

What’s in a test plan? Whatever you want, as long as it gives you direction, project scope, and a clear path to answering your bottom line business question. But here are some ideas to get you started:

Page title and URL

Test type

Hypothesis

Targeting

Description of changes or screenshot of mockup

Page traffic and time estimate

Funnel or persona target of page

A good test plan looks and acts kind of like an editorial calendar, or Agile project management roadmap. Keep a shared document to which your team can add ideas for future tests (icebox), and work at least two weeks ahead. Tests take about two weeks to complete, depending on traffic, and a deliberate schedule of rolling launches will make those three simultaneous tests feel like an army.

4. Use custom objectives

Data might not “lie,” but it can definitely mislead. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Here’s an example of two goals set up on a test: session duration, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Session duration is a metric option baked into Optimize; our MQL data was pulled from a custom objective we set in Google Analytics. As you can see, the new variant wildly outperformed the original page in session duration, but interestingly drove far fewer MQLs:

Comparing performance by MQL

Comparing performance on Session Duration

If we’d just been looking at session duration, we might think our new variant won. But because we had a critical custom objective in place, we could tell that the original was actually converting more effectively. In this case, taking the time to get our real business goals and KPIs into the test saved us from pushing a “winning” variant to our whole site, which ultimately would have meant losing business.

5. Optimize is perfect for testing PPC landing pages

One of the coolest things about Google Optimize is that you’re able to use your experiments for PPC landing pages.

Using Optimize for PPC landers is might be the fastest way to see quantifiable ROI from A/B testing. Landers are typically high-converting pages with a clear, easy-to-measure goal. You can run multivariate tests with different form lengths, CTAs, titles, and imagery to determine the perfect formula for a high-performing landing page.

Pro-Tip: Extend the value of your newfound knowledge about what’s most effective for your target audience by crafting a set of landing-page best practices specific to your customers and your business. Make sure the learnings hold up, and keep iterating through new tests to drive your conversion rates even higher.

6. Consider starting on desktop-only

At this point, it’s a given for most marketers that you need to optimize your site for mobile traffic if you have any meaningful component of mobile visitors, let alone Google’s Mobile-first Index. This absolutely extends to testing messaging or layout changes to make sure that results do not differ by context.

That said, when you’re unsure how a change in Google Optimize will affect your CSS or breakpoints for mobile devices, you absolutely need to check. In fact, you need to check the mobile view no matter what. Trust us on this.

Although services like Unbounce or Google Optimize do have tools that allow you some control over a test appearance in mobile, it can definitely be time-consuming to get them up to snuff. In some cases with Google Optimize, we’ve simply hit a brick wall with certain complex or highly customized client sites.

For example, even on our own site getting the mobile version of a test right takes some elbow grease. Here’s a visual of a test from Portent’s Content Services page in Optimize on desktop view:

Looks fine. Now here’s the mobile view:

Ooph.

A mess, right? This is really common with Optimize. When you start moving containers around and changing the padding, your test might look fine on desktop but the mobile or tablet version will be borderline unreadable.

You can either work on your design until it works well for all devices or change the device targeting to only display to desktop users, traffic permitting:

See Section 11 for more on the importance of doing your own quality assurance.

7. Make the most of targeting options

Of course, you can (and should) target users and test based on more than just device-type. You can target users only on specific browsers, in specific countries, or even specific cities. (Or you can exclude these localities—for example, how well does your Space Needle picture and Seattle branding test with audiences outside Washington State?)

With “Page referrer” (located under “Behavior” in Google Optimize), you can target users arriving to your page through a specific source. For example, if you’re trying to test a new landing page for folks arriving via your blog, you can do that without creating a new URL; you could also serve the test only to folks coming in from a different website entirely.

With “Time since first arrival,” you can define how long a user must be on the website before the test fires in order to eliminate high-bounce sessions. And you can use JavaScript or information from your data layer to get even more granular with customers and their history on your site.

And if you’re lucky enough to have budget and need that justifies upgrading to Optimize 360, you can directly access all your Google Analytics audiences as a targeting segment.

8. Save your work

Seriously. Just do.

Optimize doesn’t have the same handy auto-save features as some of Google’s other products. If you close that window too early, kiss your test goodbye. You’ll be prompted to save if you’re trying to navigate back, but you’re SOL if you close all your tabs by accident.

Not that this has ever happened to us. Y’know, it just seems like it could be incredibly frustrating.

9. Use a script editor with script from the original website

Getting a little further into the nerdy technical best practices: When you create an experiment in Google Optimize you will have the option to work with a lot of code, and will frequently need to use it. When I first did an experiment through Optimize I had to start over at least three times because I forgot to use a script editor. Doing so keeps the code clean and accurate as you move it around.

We recommend inspecting the elements of normal, live, non-test pages on the site you’re working with and copying the code of elements you want to mimic into Atom or a similar editor.

At Portent we frequently use the script editor Atom, which is for Macs.

This means you don’t have to guess at the HTML for an element you want to create in your new design, and Atom keeps that code organized for you so you don’t make a mess of your Optimize layout. You can then paste that code right into your test design with the HTML.

Handy for not screwing up page layout, tables, image handling, etc.

10. Image hosting

Want to add an image to your test that doesn’t exist on the current website? There are two ways to do this.

Skipping ahead to the answer: The better way is to upload the image directly into the CMS of the site and link to that internal file. If you’re working for a client or you don’t have access to upload files to your site for whatever reason, an easy workaround is hosting your images on a free image hosting..

http://ift.tt/2ylUyzV