E-Commerce Analytics: Google’s New API

Get ready for another brand-spanking-new Google release! This time, it’s their Content Experiments API, an e-commerce analytics tool which should prove tremendously useful for Magentians, especially early adopters. Thanks go to Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch for his writeup on the hot topic.

Redefining E-Commerce Analytics

So what’s the big idea? Basically, the new API builds heavily on (and is thoroughly integrated with) Google Analytics, a marketing toolbox used daily by millions of online retailers, entrepreneurs, developers, administrators, and web professionals of every stripe. This enables developers to take advantage of Analytics’ horsepower actionably as they compare optimizations in real time. As Google puts it, Google Analytics is now “a full-blown A/B testing platform.” Not bad!

To be sure, Content Experiments itself has been around for about a year, and they haven’t been idle; new features and tweaks to its algorithms have been steady and well-received. It’s renowned for its “multi-armed bandit approach,” an A/B testing model which intelligently adjusts experiment output based on variant performance. Now, developers can not only adopt these time-tested approaches—they can even design and implement their own! The extended functionality allows a wide array of selection logic on the path from raw Analytics data to categorized results.

Moreover, the new API offers additional improvements over the basic Content Experiments JavaScript snippet, the only item offered by the company until now. Developers will no longer have to use redirects in order to test changes, for example, which is a major plus for user experience. And with the recent inclusion of server-side testing (a feature which goes above and beyond your typical A/B testing array), developers will be able to “try things like implementing different recommendation or search algorithms to determine what works best for your site.” And finally, Google made sure to point out non-web potential: think retail store kiosks with responsive applications in several different variants, producing weekly reports based on predetermined layouts, content, and features. Optimize away!