Why we Built Script Manager (and why it’s so handy)

The dishwasher, as I’m sure some of you will agree, is one of man’s greatest inventions (yes, I hate doing dishes that much). With the simple press of a button, I can wash all my stuff in one go and I don’t have to spend a ton of time cleaning items one by one.

Now I’m sure you’re wondering, “Paul, how does this relate to Script Manager? Where are you going with this,” but hear me out….

Before jumping into the reason behind why we’ve released a new feature like Script Manager, it’s important to review exactly what this feature is. In short, Script Manager is a new Unbounce feature that allows you to apply and update scripts on multiple pages within a domain, using a single action.

This makes adding commonly used scripts (like Google Analytics), to all of your pages, a one-time process. Every new page on your domain gets the script added automatically, so there’s no need to add scripts one-by-one. It’s basically the dishwasher solution for adding custom scripts to your landing pages. You just load up the scripts you need, set it, and forget it.

Ok, so why a whole blog article on one feature?

Well, we’ve had a number of questions come in through Customer Support and our Community asking why we built this feature instead of any of the others we could have chosen to develop. This post gives me a chance to talk a little about our product process. Oh, and as for why we chose to build this now? The simple answer is, lots of people asked for it.

The feedback we receive from our customers is a huge factor determining future integrations and features. If you share with us the reasons why you need certain features in Unbounce, our team can hear about how these improvements can benefit other customers, and your idea can gradually gain traction and be considered for development. This is why we always encourage our customers to post ideas for improvements here so that we stay in-the-know on how we can make Unbounce even better.

Now for the more complex answer for why we built Script Manager….

We have seen that the ability to add javascript to a page has been used extensively to add all kinds of different functionality to pages by a wide variety of our customers. This freedom to customize and extend the functionality of Unbounce landing pages is a key reason many of our customers choose us over other landing page builders on the market.

Custom scripts allow people to do many different things, including: adding Tracking Scripts, Google Analytics, Additional Fonts, Lightboxes and Custom Interactions. Not surprisingly, we’ve also seen that customers tend to use scripts repeatedly, for multiple pages. Although the cost to add an individual script to a single landing page was not high, (similar to washing a single dish) the cumulative effect of having to remember to add the script, copy of it, and then paste it into page after page ends up being quite time consuming (think of washing a stack of plates). With Script Manager, making the repeatable process easier for everyone just made sense.

Now the question we’re asking ourselves is, did we do it right?

Product development is an ongoing process where we research, build, and test every feature of Unbounce. With Script Manager, we’re going to look carefully at how many of you are using it and if overall adoption rates meet our expectations. What you might not know is that we also track how key features are being used. We know, for example, that within 3 days of launching, over 100 customers tried out Script Manager. We count how many customers use the feature, how many scripts they’ve added, and the number of landing pages affected. We also track the number of people contacting our Customer Success team, commenting on our Community forum or responding to our surveys to collect feedback. We hear through these channels how well we did, whether we missed any key functionality or if you have ideas for improvements.

So, what next?

Well, first we’ll keep an eye on Script Manager and make sure that it’s up to snuff. While we’re collecting the data, the product and development team will tackle the next features in our backlog of product improvements. I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag yet, but I can say that there are some very exciting projects coming in 2015.

And if you want more info on how to setup Script Manager, click here or check out the video below.

 

 

– Paul Doerfling
Product Manager