Optimizely Web Experimentation vs. SessionCam (discontinued)

Let's start with not well suited. As a market-leading tool, they are not the cheapest option available. This means that in some cases, we cannot recommend them to clients as we know they will fall out of their budget. We would recommend them for enterprise and medium—to large businesses as we know we can trust the tool and it comes with a wide range of functionality.

Incentivized

SessionCam works well for helping you figure out what is and isn't working with a small or mid-sized business website. It can give you valuable insights regarding the flow of the user's movements on the site, and where the user might hit a dead end. Its reporting capabilities might not be powerful enough for more complex situations.

Incentivized

• Considers every kind of experiment from simple code change, code additions, code removal, javascript functions, CSS changes, and split landing redirects.
• Very friendly UC interface for easy navigation of implementation of pages, click events, experiment set up, and metric set up.
• The ability to let me know when something has reach stat sig without having to do complicated math on my own
• ability to carry UTM parameters through landing page redirects with a click of a button.

Incentivized

• Session replay.
• Integration with Google Analytics.
• Struggle score.

Incentivized

• Pricing model penalizes those just starting with experimentation.
• High price and fees based on website traffic, not experiment impressions. so you are charged whether you experiment or not.
• Integration with GA4 is subpar.
• Documentation at times confusing, different products.
• UX is confusing and too simple. It leads to errors by users. Lack of meganavs, too minimalistic, it becomes quite a frustration.
• Not competitive pricing compared with other AB testing tools.

Incentivized

• They only did one part of an audit and said they were going to finish it, but never did. I've followed up with the account person and haven't heard back. This is a recent development this didn't happen with 2 other audits they did.
• It has aspects to try and narrow down the data, but it's still a lot of data to parse, so in the end, it still takes a lot of time to truly use it.

Incentivized

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.

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

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.

Very good support and super helpful implementation specialists.

Incentivized

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.

Overall, the tools we compared against were great, but we went with Optimizely because it has all the features we needed and has the market leadership that gave us trust we would be successful in our experimentation efforts.

Incentivized

I have never used any other similar tool and I am happy to say they proved exactly what we need.

Incentivized

This rating for Optimizely Web Experimentation is rooted in the more complicated builds that are not feasible with just Java and CSS. These require the featured experimentation add on, therefore the base level platform I am giving a lower rating. We have had issues with overly complex test builds, because we can only utilize Java and CSS to make the elements

Incentivized

• Customer retention: We've reduced subscription service client churn by 20%+ using optimized unsubscribe flows.
• Risk mitigation: Testing into full site redesigns has saved clients millions of dollars.
• Feature prioritization: Identifying what painted door changes add value has allowed developers to focus on changes that add hundreds of thousands or even millions to the bottom line.

Incentivized

• Allowed us to improve our website in-house
• Relatively low cost solution
• Customer engagement and sales on website increased

Incentivized