The question has been buzzing around in the corridors for a while: with the arrival of GA4, will anything change for Google Optimize and Optimize 360? Now the high word is out and it appears that Google will say goodbye to this product from the Google suite as early as October of this year. However, the email sent out by Google to all analytics users does not contain much information yet, except for the sunset date of Sept. 30, a link to the Help Center and a short sentence about that they are looking forward to the vision of A/B testing in GA4.

Here it is important to realize that historical data from experiments will not be available after the date mentioned earlier. At this webpage is to read how to export this data so that it is not lost. Should you want to download the raw data, it is possible to use the Google Analytics Data API. Also, experiments that are running and have an end date after Sept. 30 will stop as of that date.

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And now?

This is also a good time to see if and what the currently available alternatives are. In response to the news from Google, VWO has launched a free entry-level version that supports up to 50,000 visitors. In addition, Statsig (up to 5 million hits per month) and Split.io are among the free solutions. For users who were using Google Optimize 360, there are certainly alternatives in the same price range. These include Kameleoon, VWO and Convert.

In case you do want to stay within the Google suite, this is Google's next kick to really accelerate the move to GA4 now after all. Indeed, it is interesting that Google posts a comment about the vision of A/B testing in GA4, because this suggests that A/B testing within the Google suite is not going to be dropped completely, but that it will remain available in a (possibly modified) form.

The trend seems to be anyway to try to bring as many features as possible to 1 product. In GA4 this has been done by combining App analytics (Firebase) with Web analytics (Universal), but also the link with bigQuery that has become more prominent. So with the most recent announcement, it seems that now testing (Optimize) will also be combined with analytics (Universal) in GA4. In short, make sure you are ready for when the integration of GA4 for A/B testing goes live!

Need help transitioning to GA4? Get in touch with us! Our analysts are ready for you!