VWO vs. Webtrends Optimize

Our marketing team does a lot of creative testing around messaging and imagery. VWO is well suited for this type of testing and can yield great results if you define your conversion goals correctly. However, when we have tried to do more substantial/advanced changes through VWO (such as re-positioning content or modifying elements in a form), we have had some challenges and not been able to get the desired tests working correctly.

Incentivized

There are certainly a few things to consider. If you're looking to run A/B/n or Multivariate tests with some basic segmentation or targeting then Webtrends Optimize is capable of providing that. If budget is a major consideration then that is another area where Optimize may be more attractive. However, based on both of these criteria it is my opinion that there are other tools out there that provide more value. For segmentation discovery, identification of user affinities, and execution of an effective targeting and personalization strategy then there are certainly other tools that should be considered.

• VWO has a strong support team willing to help provide answers to questions during the setup process. During setup, we had some questions regarding implementation across a significant number of sites and they were able to ease dev team concerns and provide detailed best practices to streamline integration.
• Some of the initial results of a few of the initial tests raised some questions internally. We setup a call and were able to quickly address the questions and find some opportunities to leverage moving forward.
• I discovered a bug within the UI that lead to some questions internally. I was able to report it and the problem was fixed rather quickly and their team followed up with a thank you for reporting it and to report the issue was now resolved.

Incentivized

• The Webtrends team are excellent at taking the time to understand and learn about our distinct business needs, and recommend suggestions in response.
• The Webtrends platform has undergone several changes over the time I was using it. This illustrates the constant thrive to improve their service to users, something I greatly appreciated.
• Webtrends Optimize enables the whole process to be simple with its handy instructional guides that can inform clients about using the service.

• The heatmaps within A/B tests are overlayed on the live website. Unfortunately, these don't work properly when scrolling down the site.
• I am missing an overview of all my custom conversions. I can only see a list of frequently used goals while setting up an A/B test, which may or may not include all custom conversions.

Incentivized

• 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

Visual Website Optimizer is a easy to use and powerful tool for testing web pages. We use it to test lead generation websites to increase the number of people that complete a form. Before we decided to go with Visual Website Optimizer we did research into other options and found Visual Website Optimizer to be one of the best.

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

Overall VWO is quite good with general user usability, and every person who has had to take up the mantle of using the tool itself has found it manageable. However there is definitely some room for improvement - again, perhaps this is particularly the case because we are running a large number of tests in a number of different languages (and markets, and countries!) which requires a lot of upkeep.

Incentivized

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.

I have not experienced an application error or unplanned outage with VWO.

Incentivized

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

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.

Incentivized

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

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.

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

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.

Incentivized

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

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.

Incentivized

Implementation was pretty straightforward

VWO is by far the easiest tool to use among all experimentation tools. It is like the experimentation tool for dummies and works as well as the others. A highlight would be the reports on every test because compared to the others, in VWO is way much easier to understand the metrics and the test performance.

Incentivized

Webtrends Optimize is one of the best solutions out there for digital marketers to improve their sales by providing a better experience for their customers' journey. With that said, it is also a costly solution in comparison to other services in the market today. The adage of you gets what you pay for is true as they are a market leader in the optimization space.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Our clients have seen significant increases in engagement and conversion rates through changes we recommended after using VWO to test our hypotheses.
• Our clients and internal teams have appreciated the level of granular detail available within the platform, as more information leads to more reliable optimization suggestions.

Incentivized

• 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.