Spokal was an inbound marketing platform for small businesses and freelancers. It offered a drag & drop content editor and social media sharing calendar, as well as real-time SEO analysis, keyword research, rank tracking, lead scoring, and lead nurturing. The product is discontinued, and the Spokal company has shut its doors.
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Wingify Personalization (formerly VWO)
Score8.3 out of 10
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Wingify Personalization (formerly VWO is a personalization and conversion optimization platform that enables growing businesses to conduct qualitative and quantitative visitor research, build an experimentation roadmap and run continuous experiments on their digital properties.
For current Wordpress users Spokal is outstanding and highly recommended. For clients who don't already have a Wordpress blog it's a bit tricky as I need to first sell the benefits of using Wordpress in order to get them on board, but in all honestly I would recommend Wordpress anyway, it just slows the process down having to design and install Wordpress before we can get started.
It works better for either small or big companies because small companies can start with the free plan which is very decent and has everything they need. Also for big companies who get the best paid plans they get a lot of premium functionalities, the insight module, outstanding reports. But for medium size companies who can only afford the basic paid plan, it may not be the best tool as it is very limited. For example, they cannot analize a/b tests for new and ruturning visitors, neither based on the users device category.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Content calendar - the ability to visually see blog posts in draft and scheduled to publish over the coming weeks and months was a key benefit. Tracking this in spreadsheets is too hard. we can even post blogs as topic idea, pre draft, draft and final and schedule in advance so we can visualise the messages we want to communicate. Creation of tweets and Linkedin posts is done for you automatically. Simply drag the blog post to the time slot, day, week or month. This is a lot quicker than Hootsuite
Additional tweets can be composed and also dragged to the calendar, plus the feedly link allows curation of tweet content. This just scales up our creation and curation process.
Easy simple overview dashboard - showing key website stats, new visitors, new twitter followers. New blog posts. Social enagement per blog post, linkedin shares etc. simple lead scoring based on pages visited etc. Simple realtime SEO analysis on the blog post builder
twitter builder. very simple autopilot of increasing your twitter following using key words (it easy has a simple key word tool) to find relevant people to 'like' and hence follow
Dynamic, responsive team. I have asked a few questions about futures and always received a prompt helpful reply. Chris and his team are clearly commited to developing a great product.
Once linked to your wordpress site I really like the fact I can log into a dashboard on the web and on my ipad and manage my content delivery and monitor visititors and interaction. I use and know hubspot and the biggest issue for me is the learning curve. Anyone can learn and use Spokal. It provides and integrates a number of tools I currently use today at a far lower cost. It does need to integrate into a third party email provider but frankly the integration is simple. A lot of effort has gone into the design for non techies
VWO is pretty easy to implement on websites and doesn't require a heavy technology lift
The VWO interface is pretty intuitive and let's non-technical users make variants for testing
The VWO reporting dashboard is excellent for determining statistical significance and understanding whether differences in conversion rates are meaningful or not
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I personally would love to see more direct integrations into CRM and more powerful Marketing Automation tools, but the current Zapier integration is a general approach and works in most cases very well.
The user interface within VWO does take a bit of time to get used to, especially as it pertains to switching back and forth between tests. When running multiple experiments on a site at a time, a clear and succinct dashboard for everything in one place would be helpful (as opposed to needing to switch between A/B, multivariate, etc).
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Spokal delivers everything I need to serve my clients in one place. It's so easy to use and their customer service is always available and responsive, there's no need for me to look elsewhere.
It's great value and we think we've ironed out all the major teething troubles. However, if we experience any more bugs or problems that significantly slow us down then we're seriously considering switching to Optimizely, which I haven't personally tested but have heard great things about from my CRO peers
Spokal takes away some of the complexity and noise that Wordpress has. Offering a separate login and dashboard to allow a user to create blog posts, check on backlinks, see ranking keywords, social engagement and tracks visitors/ contacts. Spokal provides a lot of functionality that would typically require the purchase of several products e.g. Hootsuite, SEO Moz, SEO pressor, Hubspot. What I really like is the content calendar. I simply drag and drop of my blog posts into my calendar to post to twitter, linkedin and facebook. This is an easy way to repost evergreen content and build my following on twitter. The twitter builder is constantly looking for relevant profiles and conversations based on my defined criteria. The tool automatically likes the twitter user which drives traffic to my sight and actually helps me find followers and potential influencers. This product is ideal for people new to internet marketing or small business owners who don't want to be overwhelmed by the effort to learn, manage and run several tools or wordpress plugins. I have been with Spokal since the start and I continue to be impressed by the support and raft of new functionality being added.
I gave Visual Website Optimizer a rating of 8 because it is overall a great product to use. Setting up and keeping track of various tests is easy and straight forward. The only reason why this product is not rated higher is because the support documents online leave a lot of room for improvement.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
VWO doesn't appear to slow down our website at all, though some customers with adblockers like UBlock Origin have been known to not see entire pages if VWO is making changes to the page at a macro level (background, font, etc). This is rare though.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
While their online document support is lacking a simple email to their support team will almost always get responded to the next day. It has however taken more than one email to explain the problem to the support team till they understood the problem. The solution I was given also only half fixed the problem the rest I figured out on my own.
Training was good, just limited to the onboarding process. They walked through all of the steps it takes to get started in VWO and each of the modules, along with giving us ideas for starting our first test. I feel like it could be better if there was a guided process within the VWO program to continue to educate you along the way, and a way to turn that off for experienced users.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Overall, the implementation of VWO is straightforward. If you've got a straightforward way of deploying code to all of your test pages, either a good CMS or a TMS, then implementation should be a breeze. There is no tweaking to be done to the code itself, and once deployed it has the flexibility to cope with different VWO modules (tracking, conversion analysis, session analysis) without modification.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I haven't really tried other products at this point. I would say I tried to cobble together a bunch of options to make the right inbound marketing "tool suite". Nothing quite worked well enough. Again, Spokal serves as a very cost-effective option. Particularly relative to Hubspot.
There are significant differences in each platform when it comes to Optimizely and vwo. From a functionality and performance perspective they each have their pros and cons. It is important to go through the feature sets of each and ensure the solution you select will work specifically with your business objectives and conversion rate optimization goals
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The product seems infinitely scalable for our needs (small business) and we've never had any issue with loading VWO-edited elements. I will say, though, that online customers with ad blockers have been known to not see certain VWO elements as their third-party scripts are disabled.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It's still early for us, but we can definitively say that we've cut our content creation / curation time down by about 40% while INCREASING the volume of quality relevant content that our audience expects.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
