March 2019 product update

Once again March so far has been very busy with our program of continuous improvement. A selection of new features,  a number of enhancements and some very minor background bug fixes

Product update notifications will soon be featured at the login screen of app.webtrends-optimize.com with a link to this page.

If you have any suggestions of things you’d like to see in the product, please continue to feed into our product roadmap using our JIRA portal (which you should have access to), or to keep feeding suggestions to our services team. We’ll happily test them out, measure the effectiveness, and get them out for everyone to enjoy!

	Optimize in the Optimize UI (NEW Feature) Using Optimize to test inside of Optimize! Once again, we’re tagged up and ready to run experiments inside of our own product as a commitment to making continual improvements. Whether discrete improvements to UX, or large feature drops, we’ll be working out how to ensure all of our users get the best possible experience from Optimize.
	OBF In the Advanced Editor (NEW Feature) The Optimize Build Framework (OBF) is a template that our services team have used for the last 6 years for all tests that we’ve run. It neatly handles all of the messy bits associated with running complex tests – polling, page hiding, tracking, reusability, debug logging, etc., whilst also providing a standardised way of handling all of these activities so that multiple developers can navigate each other’s tests. This shining star from our managed-services projects is now available to everyone – allowing you to intuitively navigate Optimize and build tests well, without having to fuss over the intricacies of our platform.
	Target Cloning (NEW Feature) Last month we introduced segment cloning and this is another addition to improve efficiency. This allows you to replicate an existing target rather than having to create a new one from scratch. Everything contained within the existing target such as segments, throttling, and modified content will be copied so you will need to amend some of these elements before saving it as a new target.
	Server-Side Targets (NEW Feature) In addition to being able to run Server-side Abn experiments you now have the ability to run Server-side targets. Utilising Server improves page load speed, allows you complete flexibility of what experiments you can serve, reduces effort in building new experiments and increases the time long term optimals can be served.
	KPI Metric Selection (NEW Feature) In Optimize, you’re able to track as many metrics as you’d like. Whilst this is great, it makes it difficult for the platform to recognise which metrics are important to you. Our initial work on KPI selection allows users to explicitly identify these, using the same metric selector that you’re used to. Having this feature in the platform will enable us to build a stream of new features for you – more relevant messaging in the Dashboard, pre-selection in Reporting, automated monitoring and alerting, multi-armed bandit algorithms (Epsilon-Greedy / Thompson Sampling), and eventually contextual multi-armed bandit algorithms too. Needless to say, getting KPI selection in place is important to us!
	5.1 Tag (Improvement) The 5.1 tag addresses websites which utilise HTTP no-refer headers to hide where requests originate from. Previously, blocking where requests from would stop Optimize from being able to recognise your website, and subsequently be able to run. The new version of our tag works around this where required, ensuring that we run successfully more often, even when these HTTP Headers are present.
	VE Segments – Show Scrollbar (Improvement) As another tiny improvement to the platform, we’ve made an improvement to the way we display segmentation information for certain segment types, such as Data Object Attributes, Request Attributes, etc. The improvement better describes the audience, making it easier to know who you’re targeting.
	Fields with asynchronous validation have a spinner now (Improvement) As another improvement to our UI, we’ve made an improvement to the form-field validation in our UI, specifically for fields that require external checks. Where these happen, you’ll see a spinner in the field, just making you aware that we’re waiting on checks to return. An example of this is when you enter a URL to the Visual Editor to load in, which we check to make sure we’re able to access before presenting you with the full Visual Editor UI.
	Reporting tables copy into Microsoft Excel neatly (Improvement) We’re always looking at how people use our tools at a practical level. We noticed that it’s common for people to put our reporting data into Microsoft Excel for numerous reasons, but it didn’t copy over neatly. We’ve made updates to our UI that better support copy/paste operations directly from the UI into MS Excel, to help support the users that want to work that way.
	Reduced initial load time of Optimize dashboard (Improvement) Although only a minor improvement, this shaves a couple of seconds off the loading time of the dashboard which means you can start to manage your experiments quicker.
	Placeholder for experiment name in Visual Editor (Improvement) Based on client feedback we have added a placeholder “enter project name” in the project name box on the top left of the screen. This should prompt you to add your own project name when you come to save your projects. Previously this box was blank.

 

 

Bug Fixes:

On pages that are enforcing referrer policy via referrer meta tag, Optimize failed to match page URL to a Optimize Location (Page) object. This has now been resolved.

Data Tables/Data Extracts: LogID field was missing from `wt_internalapi_v1/list` API response for IO users. Custom tables now contain logID field in the UI correctly.

Publishing selection within an experiment amended to only show when a user has the correct rights.