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.

Optimizely is great for analyzing different types of campaigns. It displays results. It also has many options for campaigns and allows some flexibility when designing and launching a campaign. The dashboard displays a lot of info to compare campaign success, different types of conversions, and success markers.

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.

• It's easy to use without having to be a pro to set up campaigns and experiments up so we can evaluate the impact on the consumer experience by making the changes in production.
• it integrates easily with Google Analytics and GTM, so we can see the results of optimized experiments on GA without implementing our own API to capture optimized results for analytics.
• It has many great features, such as custom targets, metrics, audience, visual editor, and APIs; it works not only on static websites but also on single-page applications using React or Angular.

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.

• Google Tag Manager. Our challenge, it's a strange use case, but our challenge is that we don't have Google Tag Manager, so we can't integrate with GA4. And that's been a bit of a bummer. So I would like to be able to integrate with GA4 even without Google Tag Manager.

Incentivized

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

Because it's an incredible and essential tool for my line of work as a conversion optimization specialist. Really couldn't do my job nearly as effectively without it. It's paid for itself many times over and I feel like I'm only beginning to unlock the tools potential.

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.

Optimizely Web Experimentation was more robust and able to handle the broad array of sites we run than VWO. It has been a great platform to easily add additional sites onto, but still providing a universal overview of all of them, making management a simple task.

Incentivized

In theory, the scalability is great especially across different lines of businesses at our company. Having separate projects for each line of business allows for better controls between each project. However, since each project is a different snippet, it makes it difficult to work with our Single Page Application for Site. When the visitor moves to the next page, which could have a different snippet, the previous snippet will be pre-loaded

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.

• increased conversions/revenue from implementing successful experiments
• time saved by not guessing and going back and forth with stakeholder
• Used to collect click data while our GTM is down. Giving my team eyes on click data as a work around
• able to push a winning test to 100% of users until devs can get to project, so fast implementation of a win

Incentivized