Likelihood to Recommend The main point of benefit is the realtime data. This is vital to our team as we are publishing a lot of content per day, so we have a busy homepage to manage and it's important to know which content is performing well. We also like to get an understanding as quickly as possible - which Chartbeat offers - of where traffic is coming from. Often we will see an example where a page is getting high traffic from Google, for example, and we know that might not need to be placed so prominently on the homepage because the traffic is arriving to us externally anyway. Without that depth of understanding what is performing best and why - updated immediately, unlike in
Google Analytics now - our homepage would not be as well optimised for users coming to us direct
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Provides easy at-a-glance look at what people are reading right now Heads-up Display allows you to make sure the homepage is showing the content people want to read Headline testing tool provides fascinating insight into what makes people read a story and improves headline-writing ability Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Source of traffic needs improvement. Search and social make sense, but "internal" and "links" is a grey area. It would be helpful to define those with an organization and provide an information icon so users can easily remember what each of those buckets is tracking. More ways to customize the real-time board. For example, with video content, that's great that I can see a user has started a video, but what is the completion rate, was that only on O&O or can that track Facebook, too? Would like to see demo (age) information included as a way to slice the data so I can see what's working with my older and younger demo. Read full review 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). Read full review Likelihood to Renew I gave Chartbeat a 5 for a renewal rating, because, while it delivers clear and understandable content, Google Analytics also provides many of the same features for free. For a small to medium website, I believe it would be more cost effective to use Google Analytics. A website with a high amount of traffic, however, could merit spending the money on Chartbeat to maximize their potential.
Read full review 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
Read full review Usability I am able to "set it and forget it," keeping it up on my monitor for either constant checking or just keeping an eye on the numbers during the day. I'm also able to keep track of what times are perfect to post a story and which stories rack up the most traffic.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I have not experienced an application error or unplanned outage with VWO.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating I have had limited experience of support for Chartbeat but whenever I have needed help it has been there. Recently there was an issue of seeing different forms of data in real time - app and otherwise effectively, and the issue was being clearly dealt with and communicated back to us.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Omnilytics is more robust, detailed, and catered for an intermediate media user, while I think Chartbeat is a more user-friendly and beginner-oriented piece of technology. That being said, there is an impressive amount of lift for Chartbeat, and it's evident that simplicity is the key to using a software daily (which is absolutely the point in the content world).
Read full review 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.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment It has helped us save time in report generation and performance analysis. By helping us evaluate our contributors, we're able to get our money's worth. Seeing our numbers on the Big Board fosters healthy competition among brands, motivating us to distribute our stories better. Read full review 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 Read full review ScreenShots