Visual Website Optimizer
Largest users
Visual Website Optimizer is an easy to use A/B testing tool featuring point-and-click test designer and WYSIWYG editor for creating variations. In addition to being dead-simple split testing software for marketers, it also dramatically shortens time to go live with your A/B tests because of the innovative "tag-less" integration.
Visual Web Site Optimizer is also a flexible multivariate testing software (full factorial methodology) which means that no matter what kind of testing your conversion rate optimization project demands (A/B, split URL or multivariate), you can be sure that it is covered by the tool. Thousands of enterprises and small/medium businesses are using Visual Website Optimizer today for landing page optimization, increasing website sales and improving conversion rates.
Reviews for Visual Website Optimizer
Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) aims to make it simple for anyone to test different variations of their website. This is a focus for many successful Internet companies, but has traditionally been difficult for most small businesses.
How It Works:
Conversion rate optimization tools, such as Google Website Optimizer, have existed for a long time. The problem with most of these tools is they require some technical/design expertise in order to make work. VWO gets around that problem by including an easy to use online editor, which lets you create website variations in an intuitive way.
There is a small bit of code you ad to your website – which can be automated with a WordPress plugin if your site runs on WordPress. Then you just tell it what page you want to optimize, and it brings up the page, letting you select the section you want to change. You can create multiple variations for each section – using an editor.
Once you’ve created the variations you want (you create one for a regular A/B test, or can create several in different areas, for a multivariate test), you tell it how much of your website traffic should be tested, and Visual Website Optimizer magically makes it all happen.
You can define a variety of goals for your test, including:
- Click on a particular link
- Visit a particular page
- Submit a form
- Engage on the page (click anything)
- Custom goals (using a bit of javascript)
All these conversion options make the system very flexible and easy to setup. You can also setup multiple goals, if you are happy to have a visitor sign up for your email list or send in a quote request form, for example.
Reporting:
Once your test is running, VWO reports the results in real-time.
There is a graph showing the conversion rate for your goal as it evolves over time. Beneath the chart is the data, which lists the number of conversions and visitors for each variation.
The data also includes some statistics, including the expected conversion rate range, % improvement over original, and chance to beat original.
When performing a conversion rate test, it’s important to get enough data to know that your test is valid, and not just a product of chance. VWO helps you assess this through the statistical information. The system can also automatically shut off certain variations if they have proven to be unsuccessful changes.
Additional Features:
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Heatmaps:
The inclusion of heatmaps and clickmaps as a standard feature in Visual Website Optimizer is a nice bonus. I’ve previously used Crazyegg for heatmaps, and although it has some more advanced features, it’s helpful to roll that into your split-testing service. A heatmap looks like this – with dots glowing hotter for more clicks on a particular spot on the site:
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Google Analytics Integration:
If you use Google Analytics, the VWO integration with this service is another helpful feature. You add a small amount of code to your Google Analytics tracking code, and visitors are automatically tagged with a custom variable in your Google Analytics reports. In your analytics account, it looks like this:
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Segmentation:
The final VWO feature I’m going to highlight is visitor segmentation. If what you’re really interested in is optimizing conversion rate for visitors from paid search, you can have the program only count and show variations to those visitors. You can segment by a variety of variables:
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Pricing:
The largest downside to Visual Website Optimizer is the pricing. You can get a free 30-day trial, but beyond that the minimum pricing is $50/month. This is a powerful tool, but that’s a substantial price for some of the smaller companies who could really benefit from the service. It would be helpful if the trial plan (which is limited to 1,000 visitors) could be extended for ~$20/month. On the other hand, if you’re spending $1,000+ monthly on online marketing, devoting 5% of your budget to testing is almost sure to be a good decision.
There are also more expensive plans aimed at marketing agencies and larger businesses.
Conclusion:
Split-testing is a valuable practice for any website receiving a reasonable number of visitors. It has, however, always been a challenge for companies without a dedicated IT department (and depending on the company, sometimes even for those that have one). Visual Website Optimizer does a great job of simplifying this task, removing the need for technical help to run a basic test.
I highly recommend VWO to any business with a busy website – and would suggest the free trial to anyone that would benefit from an improved website.
According to the Visual Website Optimizer team: "Visual Website Optimizer is an easy to use A/B testing tool featuring point-and-click test designer and WYSIWYG editor for creating variations. In addition to being dead-simple split testing software for marketers, it also dramatically shortens time to go live with your A/B tests because of the innovative “tag-less” integration", so this reviews compares this statement with reality.
No matter what kind of testing you want to do for conversation rates and optimization, you can be sure that Visual Website Optimizer covers it. There is some feeling that this tool is more geared toward sales websites – those selling (or even giving away) a product. However, even with a blog you will probably want to work on conversions and improve things like ad clicks and clicks on other content (titles) within your blog, among other things.
Getting Started:
When you first sign in you’ll be taken through a getting started wizard, which is nice. If you’re as confused as I was when getting started, then this wizard will really help you out a great deal and let you know just what you’re doing and why. It only takes about 5-10 minutes to get setup and started tracking your conversions.
The process:
There are 4 steps to complete once you get started.
- You’ll be able to edit different parts of your website with the visual designer and WYSIWYG editor. You can click on different sections of your site and see different options like editing, removing or hiding elements, and resizing. You can create as many versions of your site as you like. They will be listed in order as variation 1, variation 2, variation 3, etc.
- You’ll then want to go through and select your conversion goals. In other words, what do you want your visitors to do? Do you want them to buy a product (if so then click on the products you want to track)? Do you want them to sign up for a newsletter (if so then click on the newsletter area)? Whatever goals you have for your website, you’ll need to select that element and choose “define click here as conversion goal.”
- You’ll need to “split your website traffic amongst different versions.” I’m still a little confused at how this part works, but I’m sure this has to be somehow automated through the Visual Website Optimizer site. You’ll get a code to add to your site, so I’m sure it has something to do with this.
- Lastly you’ll need to monitor your reports and then select the best performing version of your site. Hopefully, this will in turn help you increase your clicks and/or sales, etc.
Other Features:
There are are other optional settings and tools that you can use to monitor the performance of your tests and automatically complete tasks in the background. For instance, you can choose to automatically allocate 100% of your traffic to the winning variation. There really is no need to keep testing a variation that you aren’t getting any positive results from. You can also enable integration with Web analytic tools like Clicky, Google and Omniture SiteCatalyst. There are even plugins for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla which make using Visual Website Optimizer even more convenient.
The Verdict:
With all of the features and added benefits over similar tools like Omniture and Google Website Optimizer, I think that Visual Website Optimizer is a wonderful option and worth the price. Everything is laid out for you to use and you have the ability to optimize your conversations to the max. While you can be a little confused with all of the tools and terms, the website is very easy to use and there are explanations for just about every feature and option. You will need to do a little extra reading, but hey no pain, no gain!
