Doing it fast with Optimizely
September 09, 2015
Doing it fast with Optimizely
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely
Optimizely is now our primary tool for A/B testing and deploying temporary code fixes between releases. It's been an amazing tool for us and has helped us ramp up our optimization efforts considerably. We've gone from deploying a handful of experiments per year to launching several new tests every week. I'm the primary user of the tool, working in the product department, but I often seek out help from various developers as we conceive of progressively more complicated experiments. I've been amazed by what you can do with Optimizely and a little determination. We've lifted conversion rates all over our site with Optimizely.
- Optimizely has a very intuitive interface that really makes learning to use the tool quite easy. Even a complete novice can develop and deploy simple A/B tests with minimal effort.
- Optiverse, Optimizely's support forum, is an excellent place to learn how to take your A/B testing to the next level. I've gone from running simple copy change tests to advanced multi-page funnel testing.
- The ability to simply modify existing pages on your site rather than recreating them and redirecting traffic has been immensely valuable and allowed us to deploy tests much faster than we did before.
- I'm often frustrated with how hard it is to monitor results from my phone. I wish there was a mobile optimized version of the results section. I'm often travelling on the weekends and need to check on our tests via my phone. It can be done, but it's a very sub-optimal experience.
- I wish I could see the results of all my active tests on a single dashboard. Currently you have to drill into each experiment individually. Since I sometimes have as many as 10-15 experiments running, a good part of my day is spent monitoring a ton of open tabs for each test.
- Just nitpicking, but it would be nice to be able to reorder your experiment's goals without having to exit editing mode and return to the main projects page.
- Higher conversion rates across our site!
- Greater insight into how visitors use our site.
- Massively increased employee productivity.
- A less buggy user experience since we can quickly deploy temporary fixes when bugs are discovered.
- Facilitates a culture of testing. Because it's so easy to do, we test many of the changes we make to our site prior to deploying them in our code. "Let's test it" is a very common phrase around here.
We often use the Ion platform for building short-term marketing landing pages. It has a great interface for doing so, but is difficult to use as an A/B testing platform for already established traffic sources. It requires rerouting our traffic which is both inefficient and dangerous for us to do at the scale which we like to test. We're much more confident using Optimizely because we're simply modifying the existing experience rather than rerouting users to another website. And if something is not working right with a test, we can simply turn it off. I feel very safe deploying large-scale tests using Optimizely.
Using Optimizely
Product Managers and Developers
Solid understanding of key business objectives and the ability to edit CSS and jQuery
- A/B optimization testing
- Deploying temporary bug fixes
- Gaining insights about how visitors interact with our site
- Refining marketing copy
- As a stop gap solution for bugs
- To customize pages for business partners on our site
- Temporairly redirecting SEM traffic from inefficient pages
- Swapping images and copy for Marketing and Legal
- Longer multi-page experiments
- Testing site-wide changes to headers and navigation
- For co-branding opportunities