Convert Experiences vs. Webtrends Optimize

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.

Webtrends optimize is a marketing solution aimed squarely at transactional and eCom based websites. I would only recommend a colleague to engage with the solution once the marketing dept is at a point where their website is fully optimized in regards to SEO and all the other fundamentals in order to truly build upon what Webtrends can offer. This shows you an easier way of measuring your ROI and the money you will invest with the tool-moving forward.

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.

• Intuitive test set-up makes for a low learning curve.
• Ability to create custom data tables which enable exporting of visitor level data for more in-depth analysis outside of the Webtrends Optimize platform.
• Visual Editor WYSIWYG interface enables non-technical users to easily execute basic tests.

• 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.

• The cost is a factor. When you're trying to save money, particularly as a startup (a lot of our clients are up-and-comers) it has to be seen as an investment...but the cost to implement the system is fairly large.
• There's a bit of a steep learning curve, you can't just dive into the program.
• It's not impossible but it's not as easy as snapping your fingers to easily implement the program cross-platform.

Incentivized

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

Difficulty was getting business units to take the time and spend the money to test, and then implement, best options.

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.

Set up of basic tests that do not use segmentation or targeting is an intuitive experience that can be learned quickly by new users. However, as the need for segmentation and other more advanced capabilities arise, the experience begins to degrade.

zero complaints. I'm not aware of it ever failing.

Zero complaints. It seemed to do its job quickly and accurately.

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

Incentivized

The support from the team at Webtrends Optimize is unparalleled. There is always someone to consult should there be any issues.

Online training was ok. Because every test is a custom test, there's only so much that can be covered in a generic lesson.

Implementation was pretty straightforward

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.

Webtrends Optimize can be used for much more complex tests, allows better conversion tracking and data collection. Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) is suitable for smaller, simple projects. Webtrends Optimize comes with an excellent consultancy that could save you a lot of time and resources

• 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.

• So far we haven't seen an ROI that we can accurately measure due to only running a couple of tests that haven't resulted in direct, site wide changes. However, we have learnt a lot about how to set up the right processes and documentation.