Convert Experiences vs. Optimizely Web Experimentation

Definitely well suited for budget conscious companies that want a solid array of functionality but without having to pay an exorbitant amount. Great for marketing and analytics team members that need the ability to get in and set up tests w/o dev assistance. But, functionality is there for developers to get in and set up more complicated tests.

I think it can serve the whole spectrum of experiences from people who are just getting used to web experimentation. It's really easy to pick up and use. If you're more experienced then it works well because it just gets out of the way and lets you really focus on the experimentation side of things. So yeah, strongly recommend. I think it is well suited both to small businesses and large enterprises as well. I think it's got a really low barrier to entry. It's very easy to integrate on your website and get results quickly. Likewise, if you are a big business, it's incrementally adoptable, so you can start out with one component of optimizing and you can build there and start to build in things like data CMS to augment experimentation as well. So it's got a really strong a pathway to grow your MarTech platform if you're a small company or a big company.

Incentivized

• Over the top powerful Javascript enabled targeting. This feature is called DMP Profiling and is available in the Pro Plan, currently only +$100 more than the plus plan. An article explaining this feature is here for further reading: https://convert.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206631623-Target-experiment-based-on-a-custom-Javascript-condition-that-evaluates-true-at-a-later-stage. I wrote up a much longer explanation but TR broke it up weirdly. The gist is that you can powerfully use JS to target. This allows me to target users in our SPA in incredibly advanced ways. I can walk their entire history model and assign them an audience value, or I can exclude them. It's MUCH more powerful than just a "Site Area" tool. We recently used it against 900K users to check if they had written a review of their apartment or not yet. This allowed me to only expose the user on the homepage to an experiment that prompted them to write a review while excluding users that couldn't write a review from the experiment (because they had already written one). The experiment converted 50% better than what we do now, generating 9k reviews in a matter of hours.
• Audience targeting IN ADDITION to all that fancy DMP targeting. This means I can define demographics or other data as a qualifier AS WELL as the previously mentioned qualifier. This can be setup in so many ways: Traffic source, Visitor Data, Include / Exclude users part of a current experiment (!!), Date/Time, Device/Browser/OS, JS Conditon
• Real-time reporting that makes sense to the whole company to view. Seriously, I can share a Convert Report to any level of intelligence on my team and they understand what's happening.
• Audiences and Goals are saved as presets, so your entire team can use them. Using the example above, we have an audience called "Wrote a Review" that we exclude from the Review Prompt treatments.
• Their customer support is seriously fast at answering questions. I've never had to wait more than a day.

• The Platform contains drag-and-drop editor options for creating variations, which ease the A/B tests process, as it does not require any coding or development resources.
• Establishing it is so simple that even a non-technical person can do it perfectly.
• It provides real-time results and analytics with robust dashboard access through which you can quickly analyze how different variations perform. With this, your team can easily make data-driven decisions Fastly.

Incentivized

• We are aggressive testers and have demanding clients, and if there was any part of the Convert platform where I'd like to see improvement, it would be in the reporting section where I feel a vertical report could present in a more readable fashion to the users.

• JavaScript is hard to implement sometimes especially for JQuery elements
• ROI reporting should be part of the overall experimentation reporting
• CMP integration: where we can easily show status of test on the HPT request
• CMS integration
• More widgets like social proof banners, etc.

Incentivized

Couldn't live without this, no other tool does precisely what we need them to do

I rated this question because at this stage, Optimizely does most everything we need so I don't foresee a need to migrate to a new tool. We have the infrastructure already in place and it is a sizeable lift to pivot to another tool with no guarantee that it will work as good or even better than Optimizely

Incentivized

To use the platform in the context of developing enhanced tests that stretch the platform there is as with most things a learning curve. However, if you're a casual user or have standard experiments that you wish to run you would be easily able to hit the ground running.

Optimizely Web Experimentation's visual editor is handy for non-technical or quick iterative testing. When it comes to content changes it's as easy as going into wordpress, clicking around, and then seeing your changes live--what you see is what you get. The preview and approval process for sharing built experiments is also handy for sharing experiments across teams for QA purposes or otherwise.

Incentivized

I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's availability as a 10 out of 10. The software is reliable and does not experience any application errors or unplanned outages. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.

Incentivized

I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's performance as a 9 out of 10. Pages load quickly, reports are complete in a reasonable time frame, and the software does not slow down any other software or systems that it integrates with. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.

Incentivized

I use support only in very emergency cases. The support hasn't been very helpful and suggests the problem is on my site

Incentivized

They always are quick to respond, and are so friendly and helpful. They always answer the phone right away. And [they are] always willing to not only help you with your problem, but if you need ideas they have suggestions as well.

The tool itself is not very difficult to use so training was not very useful in my opinion. It did not also account for success events more complex than a click (which my company being ecommerce is looking to examine more than a mere click).

In retrospect: - I think I should have stressed more demo's / workshopping with the Optimizely team at the start. I felt too confident during demo stages, and when came time to actually start, I was a bit lost. (The answer is likely I should have had them on-hand for our first install.. they offered but I thought I was OK.) - Really getting an understanding / asking them prior to install of how to make it really work for checkout pages / one that uses dynamic content or user interaction to determine what the UI does. Could have saved some time by addressing this at the beginning, as some things we needed to create on our site for Optimizely to "use" as a trigger for the variation test. - Having a number of planned/hoped-for tests already in-hand before working with Optimizely team. Sharing those thoughts with them would likely have started conversations on additional things we needed to do to make them work (rather than figuring that out during the actual builds). Since I had development time available, I could have added more things to the baseline installation since my developers were already "looking under the hood" of the site.

Convert was selected based on price point, feature set, and UI/UX. All three are very friendly to new testers and small to mid-market size companies. Their UI and tool workflow is the best out of all of the non-enterprise solutions that I have tried. There is some small room for improvement, but that only really affects power users or tests that require significant coding/development work to execute.

The ability to do A/B testing in Optimizely along with the associated statistical modelling and audience segmentation means it is a much better solution than using something like Google Analytics were a lot more effort is required to identify and isolate the specific data you need to confidently make changes

Incentivized

We can use it flexibly across lines of business and have it in use across two departments. We have different use cases and slightly different outcomes, but can unify our results based on impact to the bottom line. Finally, we can generate value from anywhere in the org for any stakeholders as needed.

Incentivized

• Using Convert has allowed us to make quick decisions on site edits and price changes. Seeing and sharing quick results makes our operations much more profitable.
• Connecting the tests with Shopify has produced very valuable and timely results that we can act upon as soon as we see statistically significant results.

• We're able to share definitive annualized revenue projections with our team, showing what would happen if we put a test into Production
• Showing the results of a test on a new page or feature prior to full implementation on a site saves developer time (if a test proves the new element doesn't deliver a significant improvement.
• Making a change via the WYSIWYG interface allows us to see multiple changes without developer intervention.

Incentivized