Likelihood to Recommend It is well suited for heavy-duty A/B testing where management would like to see and quantitatively determine the effect of a change. It is not so efficient to try for a single page simple form, except when the form is part of a larger workflow. The security model is not very well understood, including RBAC and protection against injection attacks.
Read full review If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.
Read full review Pros Provides quicker release cycle for the way the product cards should be displayed. Provides feedback for new product introduction and how it'll be perceived. Allows rapid blackout from user experience changes that alters traffic flow. Read full review Quick Starts make it so easy to get started. Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process. The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great. Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful. The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility. Read full review Cons Can use better interface for managing test, including scheduling and notification. Feels too heavy for simple projects, though this isn't a factor once past the PoC stage. Notification on various aspects can be made more powerful and granular if such a need arise. Read full review Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video. Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user. I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.
Laura Medley Interactive and Digital Strategy, Production and Marketing Consultant
Read full review Usability Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported
Read full review Performance Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.
Read full review Support Rating The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.
Read full review Online Training They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.
Read full review Implementation Rating There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.
Read full review Alternatives Considered There is a big difference between the two:
Google Optimize uses Bayesian analysis while Optimizely uses Frequenting. There is a risk of counting multiple visits.
Google Optimize data isn't available instantly (if I remember correctly). Optimizely's analyses dashboard is a lot richer and offers a better experience, though it may get intimidating.
Read full review I was not the decision maker to choose this over
Uberflip , but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.
Read full review Scalability Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.
Read full review Return on Investment Almost immediate payoff in terms of the benefit. Easy to justify the TTM benefits to upper management. Still somewhat hard to justify ROI, though this is not my expertise. Read full review Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it Read full review ScreenShots Optimizely One Screenshots Ion, by Rock Content Screenshots