Acoustic Tealeaf vs. VWO

Take a formal training class before diving in. It will benefit you greatly. I would suggest starting with an intermediate class if they have even a small understanding of the product beforehand.

Our marketing team does a lot of creative testing around messaging and imagery. VWO is well suited for this type of testing and can yield great results if you define your conversion goals correctly. However, when we have tried to do more substantial/advanced changes through VWO (such as re-positioning content or modifying elements in a form), we have had some challenges and not been able to get the desired tests working correctly.

• Tealeaf is exceptionally useful for troubleshooting technical issues and investigating conversion problems. It gives you the ability to look at individual sessions, so that you can see exactly what steps the customer has taken to cause the problem. This way you can recreate errors, or determine if the layout of the site is confusing the customer and preventing sales.
• Tealeaf allows you to create alerts to track specific problems. For example you can set an alert if the error handler on the site fires more than 5 times in 15 minutes, or if the completion rate of a specific process drops below a certain percentile. This lets your production support group get a jump on problems and gives them a chance to start working on a solution before the business users or the site help desk have reported the issue.
• Tealeaf allows you to create reports and dashboards to track activities on your site. You can set these up to monitor sales, sign-ups, errors, traffic load, just about anything. You can arrange to have these reports sent by e-mail, so business users can be kept up to date on the status of the web site.
• There are scorecards in Tealeaf that allow you to create reports to track a series of events. This let you see where people are falling out of a process so you can determine where customers are struggling and improve the customer experience.
• It's possible to shadow-browse a customer's web session, allowing a help desk analyst to provide better customer service by seeing what the customer is seeing and following along with their session.

• VWO has a strong support team willing to help provide answers to questions during the setup process. During setup, we had some questions regarding implementation across a significant number of sites and they were able to ease dev team concerns and provide detailed best practices to streamline integration.
• Some of the initial results of a few of the initial tests raised some questions internally. We setup a call and were able to quickly address the questions and find some opportunities to leverage moving forward.
• I discovered a bug within the UI that lead to some questions internally. I was able to report it and the problem was fixed rather quickly and their team followed up with a thank you for reporting it and to report the issue was now resolved.

• Loading sessions can take time or doesn't work smoothly.
• Visual pages are missing in some sessions which can make it difficult to understand a certain user pain point.
• Segmentation for complex user-facing websites could require initial coding.

• The user interface within VWO does take a bit of time to get used to, especially as it pertains to switching back and forth between tests. When running multiple experiments on a site at a time, a clear and succinct dashboard for everything in one place would be helpful (as opposed to needing to switch between A/B, multivariate, etc).

Tealeaf is a highly demanding tool that can report just about any KPI one can think of. The reward can be great if one is willing to put the time and effort into building a comprehensive and organized event structure.

It's great value and we think we've ironed out all the major teething troubles. However, if we experience any more bugs or problems that significantly slow us down then we're seriously considering switching to Optimizely, which I haven't personally tested but have heard great things about from my CRO peers

I gave Visual Website Optimizer a rating of 8 because it is overall a great product to use. Setting up and keeping track of various tests is easy and straight forward. The only reason why this product is not rated higher is because the support documents online leave a lot of room for improvement.

I have not experienced an application error or unplanned outage with VWO.

VWO doesn't appear to slow down our website at all, though some customers with adblockers like UBlock Origin have been known to not see entire pages if VWO is making changes to the page at a macro level (background, font, etc). This is rare though.

While their online document support is lacking a simple email to their support team will almost always get responded to the next day. It has however taken more than one email to explain the problem to the support team till they understood the problem. The solution I was given also only half fixed the problem the rest I figured out on my own.

Training was good, just limited to the onboarding process. They walked through all of the steps it takes to get started in VWO and each of the modules, along with giving us ideas for starting our first test. I feel like it could be better if there was a guided process within the VWO program to continue to educate you along the way, and a way to turn that off for experienced users.

Overall, the implementation of VWO is straightforward. If you've got a straightforward way of deploying code to all of your test pages, either a good CMS or a TMS, then implementation should be a breeze. There is no tweaking to be done to the code itself, and once deployed it has the flexibility to cope with different VWO modules (tracking, conversion analysis, session analysis) without modification.

I used Google Optimize when it had just launched. It was therefore not yet a competitor to VWO. I haven't used it in roughly half a year time, so a lot has probably changed. I still use Hotjar for certain features that VWO offers, but which I think function better in Hotjar. I for instance prefer the Hotjar heatmaps, because I can elect to ignore certain elements on the webpage, such as a cookie consent pop up. A simple difference which makes me like Hotjar recordings more is that I can view a recording and click next, rather than going back to the overview and selecting the next recording.

The product seems infinitely scalable for our needs (small business) and we've never had any issue with loading VWO-edited elements. I will say, though, that online customers with ad blockers have been known to not see certain VWO elements as their third-party scripts are disabled.

• Provides context to developers - As with pretty much any programmer, they need context of user activity leading up to a problem in order for them to debug code. TeaLeaf does a great job of doing that. We can identify a problem in the code, search for a TeaLeaf (and Java application session) that has the problem in it and show the developers what the user was doing when the problem happened. This greatly speeds up the time to resolution.

• The ability to offer a CRO service is greatly enhanced by VWO, as it allows us to run tests for clients
• The editor means to some extent we don't need much developer resource to run the tests, lowering costs of doing so