First Look at Our Next Plugin…

Author 
Shane Melaugh   67

Updated on December 31, 2019

In today's video, we're unveiling our next plugin release. I thought a good way to do so is to simply show you exactly what this new tool does, so you'll see just how quick and easy it is...

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The Thrive Themes team loves pushing the envelope and that's exactly what we've done here, with our upcoming plugin. We took on something that is A) extremely important for online businesses and B) generally complicated, time consuming and expensive. Namely: A/B testing. And we're delivering a solution that is fast, seamless, codeless and happens without you ever leaving your WordPress dashboard.

Thrive Optimize will be a premium add-on for Thrive Architect and it's being released next week!

Stay tuned for the launch announcement.

Shane

by Shane Melaugh  January 26, 2018

67

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      • If I look at the concept I don’t see a single page, but two pages with the same URL.
        The Google bot, if viewed as an ordinary user, could be diverted to a page in a scan, and in the next scan to the other, detecting a different page at each scan of the same URL. Unless at the level of the plugin there is a different option, which detects the bot and always directs it to one of the two pages. That’s why I asked the question.

    • This is built for Thrive Architect only. The tight integration with our own builder is what makes it so easy and seamless in the first place.

      • It would be great if there was the option to use Thrive Optimize with the default WordPress editor (even if it is slightly less seamless). Is that something you’ll consider at any point? Built my entire site in the WordPress editor (no visual editors), so fingers crossed… Would love to be able to use this alongside the other Thrive plugins.

  • Beautiful Shane. The reason we avoid testing is exactly as you said……..it is hard to set up. No excuses any more with this. Thank You

    • Yes, that’s exactly what I hope to achieve. Even I haven’t tested as much as I know I should have, just because of the technical barriers.

  • This is by far the best, most needed tool you’ve created for Thrive. I had been missing Hybrid Connect that I followed you from to Thrive, because the split testing there was SO much easier.
    I had even written in the forum when I first came over here, that I wish you would make the split testing easy again.
    So, bravo! This is your best new thingy yet.

  • I’ve been waiting years for you guys to roll something like this out. So I’m happy it’s finally here so we don’t have to use VWO or optimizely.
    I’m assuming you’ll eventually move to multivarient testing options as well.

    But for what you currently have rolled out, can you answer the following:

    1. How does this work with SEO Crawlers? How do you avoid the situation where both your test page and control aren’t showing up in the search results? Is the test version no-indexed or canonical’ed to the original until a winner is selected? Then 301 redirected if the test is the winner?

    2. Can the goal be an external page outside your own wordpress blog?
    For instance, as an affiliate marketer, I have landing pages designed to push people to an affiliate product that reside on my partner’s site and use multiple CTA affiliate links.

    So for instance, lets say I’m promoting Pepsi on my wordpress landing page.
    I may have 3-4 CTAs that link to an external site with different sub id urls:

    1. CTA 1 https://pepsi.com/subid=topofpage
    2. CTA 2 https://pepsi.com/subid=middleofpage
    3. CTA 3 https://pepsi.com/subid=endofpage

    Can the goal of page visit, be set up to have two settings.
    1. Exact url matches: https://pepsi.com/subid=topofpage
    2. Url Starts with: https://pepsi.com/

    The second will account for situations where we have multiple urls but with different Sub-ids that are necessary for other types of tracking.

    This would be very useful for affiliate marketers.

    3. Is this functionality only available for landing pages and not posts?

    4. Can you have multiple goals running? For instance visits to various pages and subscribe? Some pages will have multiple CTAs.

    Either way I’m excited about this functionality. It should be very helpful and I’m sure it will become robust over time.

    Thanks.

    • Hello Eddy,

      We don’t plan to implement any multivariate testing, no. Multivariate testing only makes sense for sites with tons of traffic. I wouldn’t even think about it below 1 million visitors per month. Most people who use multivariate testing are just seeing patterns in the noise and think they’re making progress. It’s a lot like seeing faces or animals in the clouds. Basically, multivariate testing is very much an enterprise thing and that’s not our target market.

      1) Search engines only ever see the control. Until you choose a winner, at which point your content is switched out and search engines see the new content from then on.

      2) Not yet, no. We don’t have URL matching or anything like that yet. The focus of this plugin is on usability and speed, so we’re not looking to serve a lot of advanced use cases.

      3) It currently only works for pages and landing pages. We may activate it for other post types in the future, as well.

      4) No, it is made to track one goal per test.

    • We don’t have specific features for WooCommerce product page testing yet. We may add that in the future, if there’s enough demand.

      • WooCommerce product page A/B testing would be super awesome! +1 for sure 🙂

  • This tool will be awesome. Really waiting for it!
    However I am more excited about the new theme, I can’t wait it.
    Shane, can you give us some teaser like this one? 🙂

  • I’ve been waiting for this plugin for months and the time has finally arrived. I’m SO excited about it!

    What’s the price going to be? I really hope you add an “unlimited site” license to it like you did with the original Thrive Content Builder. 🙂

    • Thank you, Miguel! We’re really excited about this new addition to our product family as well.

      We don’t sell unlimited licenses anymore and won’t for this, either.

      • So, is this only going to be available as part of the subscription, or will there be a once-off, per-site licence available?

      • You’ll be able to buy it as a bundle with Thrive Architect or as a premium add-on for Thrive Architect too.

  • Because a page displays completely differently on desktop, tablet and cell phone, an A/B test result can be quite misleading if the winner is selected as a result of the plugin’s assessing the largest number of signups (or similar goal) for the SUM of all 3 device type views. Let’s say that in the specified time period, Page A gets sign ups from 90% of 100 desktop viewers, 30% of 20 tablet viewers, 0% of 50 cell phone viewers. Similarly, Page B gets sign ups from 10% of 100 desktop viewers, 70% of 20 tablet viewers and 100% of 50 cell phone viewers. Page A’s total is 96 subscriptions. Page B’s total is 74 subscriptions. Page A ‘wins’. If the plugin chooses Page A, it’s given me the wrong result vis a vis my 50 cell phone viewers, which is impactful because I know that my cell phone viewership is rapidly growing while my desktop viewership is declining. The ideal A/B test would select one winner for desktop view, one winner for tablet view and one for cell phone view and provide the number of views for each of the 3 device types, so that I can make a meaningful decision about which page to choose. Hopefully your plugin (or an update to the initial release) will provide this deeper level of analysis.

    • In most cases, it won’t play out so dramatically. I agree that device specific testing and content can be useful, but our main focus for Thrive Optimize is speed and usability. We’re not keen on adding a lot of feature bulk and complication to it.

      Google Optimizer has very advanced targeting and filtering options. They only work for the duration of a test, though. Once the test concludes you need a different system to serve different content to different visitor segments.

      For 90%+ of online businesses, this is well into the area of diminishing returns. Just running A/B tests regularly will make a massive difference for any business. More advanced filtering, segmentation and targeting can be great, but it comes well after a solidly established optimization practice in a business.

  • Excellent addition to the Thrive stable. It’s obviously much more than the Headline Optimizer plugin, but I’m keen to know if you see this as a replacement for that, or complementary to it?

    • It’s a completely separate product from Thrive Headline Optimizer. Thrive Optimize works on the level of page content and landing pages, while Thrive Headline Optimizer operates with the WordPress page or post title.

  • Ye. I like this very much. Thanks.

    Side note: when is the new themes coming?

    I have been delaying adding new pages to my sites. I want to use the new themes because the old themes are slowly and surely getting outdated…as compared to the competition.

  • This is awesome.

    Yes, it may not be as advanced as some other split testing options on the market (as pointed out in some of the other comments above), but for the average user it makes split testing so easy to implement. I will certainly be adding split testing to my site now.

    You guys certainly live up to your tagline of conversion focused websites 🙂

  • Great, Shane! We are just launching a new product. As soon as it is available, we will apply it to this campaign. Question: How is this reported (via GTM) in Google Analytics?

    Thanks,
    Tom

  • Great tool. I’ve just started my business not so long ago, and creating variations with A/B testing was at the end of my roadmap because of it’s complexity. With this I won’t have to spend much time with setting up A/B tests, thanks! Thrive membership is getting more and more valuable over time.

  • So, I run my courses through Teachable — is there a way to show conversions on another platform? I mean, I could still tell and keep track on my own — but I was wondering….

    • Hi Hilary,
      For the moment you can only have a goal that’s on your own page (such as a thank you page etc.) If your people stay on teachable you won’t be able to track it.

      • Is there any chance you guys will add something like this — or even if they click on a button — I’d be happy with that too.

      • Teachable not sure but we’ve been getting some demand for click tracking (and as always we’re monitoring what’s in highest demand for future features).

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