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9 Optimizely integrations for digital businesses, marketers, and entrepreneurs
Optimizely is an analyst-recognized, market-leading testing solution: it runs experiments and analyzes the results so you can tweak your website and pick the best version for your users.
But Optimizely alone isn’t enough to create an optimization strategy; you need tools that show you why your experiments perform the way they do, so you can understand what users think and how they react to the changes you make.
This is where Optimizely integrations come in: they give you all the context you need to optimize your product, providing you with a solid understanding of what else you need to improve.
This article explores the top nine Optimizely integrations for A/B and multivariate tests and experiments in 2023.
You’ll learn which personas each integration is best suited for, which workflow problems it solves, and how it contributes to product optimization.
Skip to the tools you need:
Use Hotjar to understand user behavior
The Hotjar + Optimizely integration helps you learn why your experiments succeed or fail.
3 Optimizely integrations for digital businesses and product teams
Optimizely integrations help you optimize digital products—like ecommerce stores, content platforms, and SaaS applications—by combining the platform's experimentation capabilities with analytics and customer feedback tools.
Use these integrations to identify areas for improvement and provide personalized experiences to specific user segments.
1. Optimizely + Google Analytics
Google Analytics tracks metrics like website visitors and bounce rates, collects user data like referrer URLs and demographics, and provides detailed insights into page views, clicks, and conversions.
The Optimizely + Google Analytics integration gives you more hard numbers and context behind your experiments and is particularly beneficial for digital marketers, product managers, user experience (UX) designers, and data analysts.
Create custom user segments in Optimizely through Google Analytics (image source)
The Optimizely + Google Analytics integration helps you:
See how your target audience reacts to changes: create custom audiences in Optimizely to personalize your website experience for different customer segments based on user insights you find in Google Analytics, like demographics, location, and interests
Produce real-time results: see real-time results, such as conversion rates, bounce rates, and engagement metrics, for each variation of your test. This means you can quickly identify winning variations and make changes to your website in real time for maximum impact.
💡 Pro tip: use heatmaps to get deeper insights into your target audience.
While Google Analytics provides insights into how users interact with your website, it can't tell you precisely where they click, scroll, or hover on your page. That's where heatmaps come in.
Platforms like Hotjar create visual representations of user behavior with heatmaps, which help you pinpoint areas for improvement, so you can test different variations of your product in Optimizely.
Use Hotjar’s User Attributes to filter your heatmaps by criteria such as your users’ different roles, like marketers or product teams, their location, whether they’re on a trial or free plan, and log-in frequency, and see how these different personas engage with your experiments.
Use Hotjar Heatmaps to see where users spend the most and least time on your experiments
2. Optimizely + Hotjar
Hotjar is a digital experience insights platform that helps you understand how customers interact with your websites, web apps, and other digital products with tools like Heatmaps, Recordings, Funnels, Surveys, and user interviews.
The Optimizely + Hotjar integration helps you combine quantitative data from A/B testing with qualitative user feedback and insights. UX designers, product managers, digital marketers, and data analysts are the principal user personas of this integration.
How to use the Optimizely + Hotjar integration:
Identify pain points: observe user behaviors with tools like with heatmapping software and session recordings alongside Optimizely's A/B testing data to better understand user motivations and preferences, so you can develop more effective experiments, target specific aspects of the user experience, and successfully optimize your product
Increase experiment effectiveness: incorporate user feedback from Hotjar Surveys and Feedback into your experiment’s design to ensure your Optimizely experiments address the most pressing user preferences. This alignment between user feedback and experimentation increases the likelihood that changes will positively impact UX and engagement, leading to a better-converting website.
💡Pro tip: use Hotjar Funnels to identify where users drop off in the conversion process.
Then, apply Optimizely's multivariate testing to these critical touchpoints, testing different combinations of page elements to find the most effective layout and design.
Hotjar’s funnel analysis with the exact percentage of users completing a step in the customer journey
Use Hotjar to find out how users interact with your website
Want to figure out exactly where visitors are spending time? And which interface elements might be causing them to drop off?
3. Optimizely + Segment
Segment is a customer data platform that helps you collect, store, and analyze customer data. This integration is invaluable for product managers, digital marketers, data analysts, and engineers who analyze user data to improve the customer experience.
How to use the Optimizely + Segment integration:
Event tracking: set up tracking for events like any time a customer views a product page, adds a product to cart, or starts the checkout process. Segment captures these events and sends the data to Optimizely, so you can identify bottlenecks, such as users abandoning carts or not completing checkouts.
Cross-device and -channel tracking: set up experiments through Optimizely on a new checkout process, for example, and use Segment’s cross-device tracking to monitor user interactions across both mobile and desktop devices
Data governance: use Segment to ensure that data is accurate, clean, and consistent before integrating it with Optimizely to ensure your experiments are based on reliable information, leading to more accurate results and insights
3 Optimizely integrations for marketers
Marketers are responsible for a wide range of business goals, from bringing in more qualified leads to improving brand awareness.
To ensure you’re not repeating tasks, you need integrations that help you test new concepts, analyze performance data, and update your customer relationship management (CRM) tool with key insights.
Let’s dive in.
1. Optimizely + Google Ads
Google Ads is a platform that helps you reach potential customers online through targeted digital ads.
Use this integration to optimize paid advertising campaigns by testing and personalizing landing pages. It’s particularly useful for digital marketers, performance marketers, and growth hackers who want to increase return on investment (ROI) on Google Ads campaigns.
Google Ads integrates with Optimizely’s audiences, so you can create hyper-targeted campaigns and experiments (image source)
How to use the Optimizely + Google Ads integration:
Enhance optimization capabilities: extend Optimizely's features such as Full Stack to paid advertising campaigns to dig deeper into ad performance data and inform website optimization efforts
Improve targeting: create more targeted landing page experiences within Optimizely for different ad groups or keywords, improving ad relevance and campaign performance using Optimizely's Personalization and Behavioral Targeting features
💡Pro tip: use Hotjar Heatmaps alongside Google Ads data to identify areas of high engagement (or friction) on your landing pages. Apply this information to create more effective A/B tests in Optimizely that help improve both ad and landing page performance.
Hotjar Heatmaps shows businesses the highest and lowest engagement zones on pages, so you can improve content
2. Optimizely + Marketo
Marketo is an automation platform that measures marketing engagement, tasks, and workflows to drive more leads, sales, and revenue to your website.
Using this integration helps digital marketers, marketing automation specialists, and growth hackers personalize website content and test website performance.
Optimizely’s dashboard with analytics you can pull from Marketo (image source)
How to use the Optimizely + Marketo integration:
Create targeted experiments: access Marketo data within Optimizely to design targeted experiments for specific audience segments and optimize lead generation using Marketo's Lead Database and Audience Management features
Nurture leads: test content and offers for different funnel stages using Optimizely Audiences to identify what resonates with your leads. This helps you create more effective lead-nurturing campaigns in Marketo.
See it in action
Imagine you head up marketing at a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company and need to improve lead generation and customer retention. Using Marketo’s data, you identify three user segments: potential customers, new customers, and long-term customers.
You can then test different messaging for each group or funnel stage in Optimizely. For example, onboarding tutorials for new customers or special offers for long-term customers. This helps you implement winning lead-nurturing strategies based on the approaches that resonate with your customers.
3. Optimizely + Salesforce
Salesforce is a CRM platform that helps you manage customer data, analyze behavior, and automate customer interactions.
This integration solves a real pain point for digital marketers, sales teams, and customer success managers who want to improve user engagement and customer satisfaction.
Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform showing the pipeline generated through content with Salesforce Pardot (image source)
How to use the Optimizely + Salesforce integration:
Create focused experiments: use Salesforce's audience segmentation capabilities, such as Custom Objects and Fields, to design targeted Optimizely experiments for lead generation
Use marketing automation to identify opportunities: integrate Pardot's Lead Scoring and Grading features with Optimizely to identify the most promising leads. Then, create targeted experiments with Optimizely’s advanced Personalization features for messaging, calls to action (CTAs), and landing pages specific to their pain points.
Measure the ROI of your campaigns: measure the impact of your experiments on conversions, sales opportunities, and closed deals by integrating Salesforce’s Pardot with Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform and hovering over the ‘additional info’ icon on the analytics board
3 Optimizely integrations for entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs are constantly spinning lots of different plates, from hiring teams to building processes. To make these workflows smoother, you need tools that automate feedback, analysis, and re-experimentation.
Let’s take a look.
1. Optimizely + Zendesk
Zendesk is a customer service platform that connects customer support teams to phone, email, live chat, and social media channels.
Through this integration, digital marketers, customer support managers, and product teams can analyze customer feedback and support data to understand what makes users click (or click away).
How to use the Optimizely + Zendesk integration:
Zendesk Guide knowledge base insights: identify content gaps on your website by analyzing the most frequently accessed articles and search queries in your Zendesk Guide knowledge base. Then, use these insights to inform your Optimizely experiments.
Enhance UX with Zendesk Chat data: gather customer pain points and preferences by reviewing transcripts and metrics from Zendesk Chat and then test new features or changes with Optimizely
💡Pro tip: use the Hotjar + Zendesk integration to get notified and create a ticket any time a user or customer responds to a survey or leaves feedback, so you can address issues quickly and ensure your customer service and experience is up to scratch.
Say you A/B test two landing page designs with Optimizely. Collect feedback via Hotjar Surveys and the feedback widget and address those user issues via Zendesk tickets. Then, use combined insights to select the best-performing page design and refine website features.
Set up the Zendesk integration to create a ticket every time a customer leaves feedback using Hotjar’s Feedback widget
2. Optimizely + Mixpanel
Mixpanel helps you track user engagement and activity on your site or app.
This is an invaluable integration for product managers, growth marketers, data analysts, and UX designers who want to conduct more experiments and generate more cohesive data.
Use Mixpanel to evaluate how two different variations in an Optimizely experiment affect your funnel (image source)
How to use the Optimizely + Mixpanel integration:
Richer data analysis: combine Optimizely's A/B testing data with Mixpanel's Event Tracking, Funnels, and Retention Analyses to get a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey
Improve experiment targeting: use Mixpanel's cohort creation feature to target your Optimizely experiments to specific user groups based on behavior, demographics, or other custom attributes
See it in action
Imagine you run a subscription-based online cooking platform but are struggling to get users to become paying customers after free trials, and you hypothesize that your pricing page is to blame.
First, use Optimizely to conduct A/B tests for different layouts and CTAs on the subscription pricing page. Then, plug in Mixpanel to track how the changes impact new visitors’ behavior and how existing users behave during trials (such as which recipes and video tutorials are most popular).
Using this information, create cohorts in Mixpanel based on user behavior and demographic data. Through these cohorts, you can target specific user segments with personalized pricing page variations in Optimizely.
3. Optimizely + Intercom
Intercom is a customer engagement software that automates customer support, lets you send personalized messages, and tracks customer engagement.
With this integration product managers, customer support agents, growth marketers, and UX designers can build chatbots and in-app messages.
How to use the Optimizely + Intercom integration:
Create in-app messaging and announcements: experiment with different strategies within Intercom by running A/B tests, and use Optimizely's Conversion Goals feature to measure the impact of these changes
Integrate with customizable chatbots: run experiments to test different chatbot interactions, response times, and messaging styles using Intercom's Custom Bots, and optimize the chatbot based on your experiment’s results
Personalized targeting: sync Intercom User Attributes with Optimizely to create more targeted and personalized experiments, tailoring your website based on individual user preferences and behavior
Use a comprehensive tool stack to create and understand your experiments
Each of the integrations we cover above solves a specific challenge—but you need to use a dynamic combination of tools to elevate your entire digital experience. For example, combining insights from Hotjar and Salesforce with Optimizely can help you understand where users gravitate and the return on investment your changes generate.
Before you get started, identify your user goals and business objectives, so you can pick the best integrations for your unique needs and create experiments that drive real results.
FAQs about Optimizely integrations
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