Businesses often have one big question for us: How can they better understand their website visitors and deliver more relevant, engaging experiences?

To help businesses test and take action, last spring we launched our enterprise-class A/B testing and personalization product, Google Optimize 360. We saw great demand, so we made it more accessible with a free beta version last fall — and that response also exceeded our expectations, with over 250,000 users requesting an Optimize account.

Today we’re very excited to announce that both Optimize and Optimize 360 are now out of beta. And Optimize is now immediately available to everyone — for free. This is not a test: You can start using it today.

A recent survey showed 45% of small and medium businesses don’t optimize their websites through A/B testing.¹ The two most common reasons given were a “lack of employee resources” and “lack of knowledge to get started.”

If you’re part of that 45%, Optimize is a great choice for you. Optimize has many of the same features as Optimize 360. It’s just right for small and medium-sized businesses who need powerful testing, but don’t have the budget or team resources for an enterprise-level solution. Optimize is easy for anyone to set up. Early users of Optimize have been happy with how easy it is to use. In fact, it’s built right on top of Analytics, so if you’re already an Analytics user you’ll add just a single line of code to get Optimize up and running. With just a few clicks more, you can start using your Analytics data to design experiments and improve the online experience for your users.

Easy to use

Worried about having to hire someone to run A/B tests on your site, or frustrated about not knowing how to do it yourself? Don’t be. The Optimize visual editor allows for WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editing so you can change just about anything on your site with a drag and a drop. And more advanced users will enjoy the ability to edit raw HTML or add JavaScript or CSS rules directly in the editor.

Powerful targeting capabilities within Optimize allow you to serve the right experiences to just the right set of users. And you have flexible URL targeting capabilities to create simple or complex rules for the pages where you want your experiment to run. To find out if a targeting rule you’ve set will apply to a specific URL on your site, use the new Optimize URL tester. Just enter a URL and the tester will immediately tell you if that page is a match for your targeting rule.

Easy to understand

Optimize calculates results based on your existing Analytics metrics and objectives using advanced Bayesian methods, so the reporting shows you exactly what you need to know to make better and faster decisions.

We’ve also upgraded the improvement overview (see image above) to help you quickly see how an experiment affects the metrics you care about most, whether that means purchases, pageviews, session lengths, or whatever else you’re tracking in Analytics.

Easy to try 

Leading businesses are building a culture of growth that embraces the use of data and testing to improve the customer experience every day. We’re delighted to offer Optimize to everyone to help deliver better user experiences across the board.

As of today, Optimize is available in over 180 countries. (A special note for our European users: We’ve added a new data processing amendment to the Google Optimize Terms of Service that you may review in the UI and accept if you wish.) And we’re not done yet: Keep an eye out for more improvements and announcements in the future.

What are you waiting for? Try it right now!

Happy Optimizing!

¹Google Surveys, “Website Optimization Challenges for SMBs,” Base: 506 Small/Medium Business Owners and Managers, Google Surveys Audience Panel, U.S., March 2017

Posted by Rotimi Iziduh and Jon Mesh, Product Managers, Google Optimize