What is Optimizely and how does it matter to a QA?

Optimizely is a leading experimentation platform that improve businesses to optimize their digital experiences through A/B testing, multivariate testing, and feature flagging.

Its built in great interface, huge list of analytics, and integration capabilities make it a go-to tool for marketers, developers, and product teams.

In this post, we’ll explore how Optimizely works and provide a step-by-step guide to testing it effectively. Stay tune, this is a multi post series, covering code snippets, examples as needed.

How Optimizely Works

Optimizely operates by allowing businesses to experiment with variations of their digital assets and collect data to determine what performs best. Firstly, lets look and breakdown their core/primary functions :

1. Experimentation

• A/B Testing: Split traffic between two or more versions of a webpage, app screen, or feature to see which performs better based on predefined metrics (for example, click-through rate, conversion rate).
• Multivariate Testing: Test multiple elements (example, headlines, images, buttons) combining and simultaneously to understand how different combinations impact user behavior.
• Personalization: Customize experiences for specific audience segments using historical usage of behavioral data, geolocation and peak and non peak hours of traffic based on several other factors.