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Optimizely Web Experimentation

Optimizely Web Experimentation

Overview

What is Optimizely Web Experimentation?

Optimizely Web Experimentation empowers teams to conduct experiments (without having to rely on developer resources) in order to test various user interactions, make website changes backed by data, and personalize customer experiences.

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Recent Reviews

Not value for money

5 out of 10
April 24, 2024
Incentivized
We use Optimizely Web Experimentation to launch different experiments in our site. We have different type of audiences, coming from …
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Optimizely Review

8 out of 10
April 23, 2024
Incentivized
We use Optimizely for A/B testing and soft rollouts of changes. This allows us to test and make changes without needing to use engineering …
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Good platform

8 out of 10
April 23, 2024
Incentivized
I have used Optimizely in order to conduct simple AB tests and more complex MVT test to improve an ecommerce website. We had issue …
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Data has no opinions

8 out of 10
April 16, 2024
Incentivized
It's simple for us, we want to make data driven decisions and Optimizely Web Experimentation gives us the tools and data we need to …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 33 features
  • a/b experiment testing (101)
    9.3
    93%
  • Standard visitor segmentation (93)
    8.9
    89%
  • Test significance (92)
    8.5
    85%
  • Preview mode (90)
    8.0
    80%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Video Reviews

1 video

Optimizely Web Experimentation Review from a Director of Partnerships
08:08
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Pricing

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What is Optimizely Web Experimentation?

Optimizely Web Experimentation empowers teams to conduct experiments (without having to rely on developer resources) in order to test various user interactions, make website changes backed by data, and personalize customer experiences.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.optimizely.com/plans/

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Features

Testing and Experimentation

These features enable companies to plan, set up, and execute different types of tests (e.g. A/B, A/B/n, multivariate, split URL tests).

8
Avg 8.6

Audience Segmentation & Targeting

A set of tools used for website optimization experiments (e.g. A/B, A/B/n, funnel, split URL, multivariate tests) that can help users segment their audience in to different groups for the purpose of exposing specific audiences to tests or personalization efforts.

8.6
Avg 8.8

Results and Analysis

Tools that allow users to evaluate the results of website optimization tests (e.g. A/B, A/B/n, multivariate, and split URL tests), or view visitor interaction with webpages and specific site elements.

8.3
Avg 8.6
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Product Details

What is Optimizely Web Experimentation?

Optimizely Web Experimentation empowers marketers to conduct fast experiments and personalization campaigns without relying heavily on technical resources. Marketers can test various user interactions, make website changes backed by data, deliver personalized customer experiences, and do it all from edge networks.

Optimizely provides a single workspace for experimentation collaborators to have control and visibility across their experiments — from setting up experiment components to interpreting test results — ultimately to improve velocity and collaboration, and elevate performance.

Optimizely Web Experimentation Features

Testing and Experimentation Features

  • Supported: a/b experiment testing
  • Supported: Split URL testing
  • Supported: Multivariate testing
  • Supported: Multi-page/funnel testing
  • Supported: Cross-browser testing
  • Supported: Mobile app testing
  • Supported: Test significance
  • Supported: Visual / WYSIWYG editor
  • Supported: Advanced code editor
  • Supported: Preview mode
  • Supported: Test duration calculator
  • Supported: Experiment scheduler
  • Supported: Experiment workflow and approval
  • Supported: Dynamic experiment activation
  • Supported: Client-side tests
  • Supported: Server-side tests
  • Supported: Mutually exclusive tests

Audience Segmentation & Targeting Features

  • Supported: Standard visitor segmentation
  • Supported: Behavioral visitor segmentation
  • Supported: Traffic allocation control
  • Supported: Website personalization

Results and Analysis Features

  • Supported: Form fill analysis
  • Supported: Goal tracking
  • Supported: Test reporting
  • Supported: Results segmentation
  • Supported: CSV export

Platform Integration Features Features

  • Supported: API
  • Supported: Web analytics integration
  • Supported: Content Management System Integration
  • Supported: Integration with CRM or DMP software

Optimizely Web Experimentation Screenshots

Screenshot of the visual editor, used to make changes to the appearance and layout of a website.Screenshot of the results dashboard that displays experiment results.Screenshot of the integrations page, where integrations can be enabled.Screenshot of Advanced Audience Targeting: Custom Real-Time Segments provide customers with the ability to create rapidly-updating segments which can be used as audiences for testing or personalization. These segments can be based on profile data, omni-channel behaviors, and AI-based observations.Screenshot of AI Content Suggestions: AI-powered suggestions in the Visual Editor accelerate ideation.Screenshot of Extensions for Edge: reusable elements minimize developer dependency when launching multiple tests with the same element.

Optimizely Web Experimentation Video

Optimizely Web Experimentation Competitors

Optimizely Web Experimentation Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Optimizely Web Experimentation Downloadables

Frequently Asked Questions

Optimizely Web Experimentation empowers teams to conduct experiments (without having to rely on developer resources) in order to test various user interactions, make website changes backed by data, and personalize customer experiences.

AB Tasty, VWO, and Adobe Target are common alternatives for Optimizely Web Experimentation.

Reviewers rate Traffic allocation control highest, with a score of 9.4.

The most common users of Optimizely Web Experimentation are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(502)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(126-150 of 186)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used for simple A/B tests and to force visitor traffic to pages that have specific messaging or UI elements
  • Very easy to configure experiment targeting, traffic allocation, and other settings you would want to customize for your testing program
  • Allows easy selection of experiment types like Multivariate, Multipage, A/B
  • Permits simple UI changes using its code editor and other options which allows for decreased reliance on development resources. Product and Design teams can launch new experiments easily on their own
  • Support is first rate: knowledgeable, great communicators who take the time to explain things so that you can learn and apply to future experiments. Optimizely customer support is among the best I've encountered from a web software service
  • Improvements can be made with experiment results reporting specifically customization of data within the data export or whatever is viewed on the summary page
  • Different organizations could have different thresholds for statistical significance. Optimizely is set to 95%. It would be nice to have this value configurable.
  • It is difficult to ascertain whether a losing variation is a statistically significant loss (only shows low chance to beat baseline). Having this would assist with pausing variations that are not performing very well.
  • Customizable, distributable reports would be a great feature to add. Currently you must click through each individual experiment to see experiment details. Seeing a summary through email or selecting multiple experiments to view on one page would be a huge improvement for scanning health of tests.
Review how front end or back end-heavy your tests plans will be. Optimizely allows for easy implementation of front end changes which won't bog down development resources. They should be able to focus on bigger fish than changing button colors, texts, or adding images to pages.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely to test out some ideas for the UI that people have instead of blindly changing our site, we get great data on the impact of every change we make. Mostly Engineering uses it, but some project managers use it as well.
  • A/B testing
  • The impact of CSS and HTML edits
  • Integrating with our database to figure out revenue impact.
  • Optimizely could be more intuitive. You have to dig through documentation in order to set up a simple A/B test.
Optimizely is good if you are looking at clicks or views, but if you're looking for the impact on revenue or other metrics in your database, you might want another tool. We personally built our own tool to account for A/B testing while looking into our own data for impact.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely is owned and operated by the marketing department, but has provided value to nearly all departments of the organization.

Optimizely helped us test content ideas, solve navigation issues, improve conversion rates, and better understand user behavior.
  • Optimizely's WYSIWYG interface allows marketers who do not know how to code to make design changes easily.
  • Optimizely informs a marketer when a test is complete and doesn't assume you have a deep understanding of statistics.
  • Optimizely's documentation is thorough and helpful.
  • Optimizely can allow novices to make many small changes that, in sum, add a lot of overhead to code execution.
  • Optimizely does not have a pleasant way of viewing past tests or exporting results.
  • It can be buggy.
Optimizely is well suite for marketers eager to get their first test up-and-running.
Benjamin Himley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely whenever our front end/design team wants to make changes to the UI. Using A/B tests with Optimizely, we measure different kinds of user engagement (search actions, registrations) and use the results to help drive design decisions. On-boarding and support from Optimizely was first-rate. I'd recommend for anybody looking to start use A/B testing for their front end.
  • Quick and easy test setup if you've got the html/css changes ready to go.
  • Detailed analytics, providing all sorts of quality information such as totals vs uniques.
  • Support always picks up the phone right away! Great with answering your questions and often also give suggestions on better ways to test
  • Please add more APIs for exporting data and integrate into a data warehouse so that we could perform our own analytics!
  • The Optimizely script sometimes slows page loading time.
  • It would be nice to be able to auto-pause experiments at a particular time.
If you've got a front end team that doesn't use A/B testing to help make their design decisions, this is a must! Not something I'd recommend a marketing/sales team to try and use on their own - you need someone who can do the necessary front end work to put together the tests.
Sergei Kogut | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely across the board, for testing new features before they're rolled out, making layout / content tweaks and testing their impact, personalizing experience for individual visitors, and even as a quick way to fix coding issues and allow developers more time to roll out a more permanent solution.
  • A/B testing - this is the core functionality that Optimizely has always been great with and only got better as they add more functionality.
  • Test analytics - the reporting pages are great, the impact of the tests on revenue is extremely difficult to calculate correctly. Optimizely has made a lot of updates to their statistics engine, latest round of changes upset a lot of people, but it's still doing a great job presenting very complicated data in a simple way.
  • Personalization - still new and barely out of beta, but already looks promising and judging by the quality of the core product, A/B testing, this should be a hit with marketers as well.
  • Test results - the under the hood calculations could be more transparent, while the statistics engine does a ton of very complex calculations that we don't really need to see, in the end it provides one number for "statistical significance". As that number changes over time, sometimes its apparent fluctuations make no intuitive sense. This can make it difficult to justify test results to management and the rest of the team.
This is true for any A/B testing platform - It's best used by someone who knows a bit of JavaScript, or has a testing team with members that have this expertise. While it's still entirely possible to make a lot of simpler "point and click" changes to your site early on using the built-in visual editor tools, as your testing program evolves some of the more advanced changes will start to require increasing amounts of HTML/JS/Query knowledge.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our organization was previously advancing different elements on our site based on design, or individual department preference. Now, using Optimizely, we are able to assess data and form a conclusion on decisions to change designs based on quantitative analyses. In addition, we have the flexibility to construct new products for our site within Optimizely's interface and deploy them without leveraging weight on our developers.
  • Great for fast development especially with basic CSS components.
  • Transparent results allow results to be shared across all departments.
  • The user interface is very straightforward and Optimizely's free online documentation is an excellent resource.
  • Advance code has issues especially with conditional activation on heavy JavaScript frameworks.
  • Direct customer service via phone is not as transparent as it could be.
  • Experiments can take a while to load, and previewing is sometimes not accurate due to slow caching issues.
I would highly recommend this tool for businesses looking to build quick tests without leveraging too much weight on developers. It could prove to be exceptionally useful for e-commerce platforms as Optimizely provides A/B testing, multivariate testing, and multipage testing. For those looking to build custom code, the platform is very accessible for all to use.
Lisa Pinto-Hendron | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We currently use Optimizely on our eCommerce site within the marketing department. It helps us address the ever present question: How do I increase conversion and user acceptance? Each project is kicked off with research through our analytics program and flows down the pipeline through design into development. Before Optimizely we would have a poorly performing section of the site and no way to test new initiatives. Now we have the tools needed to easily find a solution.
  • Optimizely has a really powerful WYSIWYG editor. Not every marketing department is blessed with a talented developer. So this puts the power in the business user's hand, without getting bogged down in coding.
  • If you are blessed with a talented developer (as we are) you also have the option of doing very advanced coding through the Optimizely program. This gives us flexibility we never had before and a window to testing we never thought possible.
  • Optimizely segmentation is a power tool. The ability to customize the testing experience based on the segment is a strong advantage to any testing tool. We haven't even scratched the surface on the segments we can test through.
  • It would be helpful to add some advanced reporting. We have some scenarios where to only want to proof our test is to follow a user down a full path which can at times be harder to accomplish. We have solved this problem, mainly, by building customer trigger events.
  • A roll-up of past tests and their outcomes might be a nice feature. We have an offline report that our team lead develops at the end of each test.
Optimizely has a large range of features that we are still learning, but we have found it great for true site testing. Its multivariate test options are vastly superior to many of its competitors. The segmentation is great for businesses that would want to delve into the realm of personalization and need to test scenarios. We have also found it helpful for testing experiences across device types.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Optimizely is used by our department but affects the whole organization. It helps us evaluate customer behavior on our website so we can make decisions based on analytics. For a time, our company would make decisions on web design based on personal feelings. Optimizely gives us a solid footing on how we make decisions and instigates new creative designs based on those trends.
  • The interface is easy to use and is always improving. I can select tests easily and navigate to goals and audiences with ease.
  • The analytics are very detailed, especially with their latest update that shows us totals vs uniques.
  • They eagerly engage with their clients, offering suggestions in how and what to test.
  • Grouping of related goals together to easily add them to similar projects. There are times when I'm running 10 tests with 12 similar goals. It would be nice to add a group of goals and then edit what else I want or don't want.
  • Some of their suggestions do not relate well to the exact context of how your industry works and how customers use your website.
  • The ability to hide/display and move goals within the results. It can be done in a spreadsheet but I would really like to see it in the web interface.
It's well suited for higher traffic content.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Optimizely on our company website to primarily help increase our customers / visitors conversion. We are an eCommerce site so our primary focus is on CTA and making sure our customers are able to easily find what they are looking for. We primarily have used it to test layout changes, but have done some redirect testing as well.
  • Their User Interface is so easy to use. You don't have to be a coder to set up a test. It's simply amazing.
  • Their support is by far the best I've ever experienced. They always pick up the phone right away and are so helpful to answer your questions and to also give suggestions on better ways to do your tests.
  • Sometimes it's a little tricky using third party jQuery plugins that we have on our site. It's not necessarily bad, but it could be better.
  • The reporting is good, but it could be more robust. Simply a data table with a time chart. Would be nice to have more of a graphical interaction for their reports.
If you are trying to improve your website, Optimizely is the model standard. Their product is unbelievably easy to use, with the ability of advanced functionality. Their support team is always there to help you out. Really no key questions that I can think of, just be up front and be honest with what you want.
Jeremy Bradford | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Optimizely is now our primary tool for A/B testing and deploying temporary code fixes between releases. It's been an amazing tool for us and has helped us ramp up our optimization efforts considerably. We've gone from deploying a handful of experiments per year to launching several new tests every week. I'm the primary user of the tool, working in the product department, but I often seek out help from various developers as we conceive of progressively more complicated experiments. I've been amazed by what you can do with Optimizely and a little determination. We've lifted conversion rates all over our site with Optimizely.
  • Optimizely has a very intuitive interface that really makes learning to use the tool quite easy. Even a complete novice can develop and deploy simple A/B tests with minimal effort.
  • Optiverse, Optimizely's support forum, is an excellent place to learn how to take your A/B testing to the next level. I've gone from running simple copy change tests to advanced multi-page funnel testing.
  • The ability to simply modify existing pages on your site rather than recreating them and redirecting traffic has been immensely valuable and allowed us to deploy tests much faster than we did before.
  • I'm often frustrated with how hard it is to monitor results from my phone. I wish there was a mobile optimized version of the results section. I'm often travelling on the weekends and need to check on our tests via my phone. It can be done, but it's a very sub-optimal experience.
  • I wish I could see the results of all my active tests on a single dashboard. Currently you have to drill into each experiment individually. Since I sometimes have as many as 10-15 experiments running, a good part of my day is spent monitoring a ton of open tabs for each test.
  • Just nitpicking, but it would be nice to be able to reorder your experiment's goals without having to exit editing mode and return to the main projects page.
When it comes to designing completely new pages from scratch, Optimizely is probably not the best tool, but it excels at modifying existing pages. That said, if you know how to write jQuery and CSS well, seems like there is no limit to what you can do with a little creativity and effort. We're constantly expanding the boundaries of what we thought the tool could do.
August 26, 2015

Optimizely > All Else

Alek Toumert | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Optimizely has been a great addition to our digital analytics landscape and opened up a world of otpimization unknown before at the AMA. The on-boarding and support from Optimizely is unmatched. They have been able to set us up for success not only in how to execute on testing, but in getting buy-in from our organization. Would recommend for any organization looking to start their own testing program.
  • Growing in terms of capabilities.
  • Unmatched service.
  • Further ecomm reporting.
Ask about integration with current analytics toolset.
Abel Ramos | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Currently, Optimizely is being used across our Marketing Technology Department. The results of the tests that we run are then shared across our company for review. This in turn allows other departments to understand some of the impacts of the decisions they are considering. The current business problem that we are using Optimizely for is to continue to grow our web presence as well as increase conversion on our site.
  • The product itself is very user friendly. There are varying degrees of technical expertise on the teams that employ this program. The product's ease of use was a real selling point.
  • Their Customer Service has been nothing short of spectacular. We have a dedicated Account Manager who is really attentive to our questions and connects us the the correct person in their organization to help solve any issues we have.
  • Their developer API connections offer so many custom solutions that are not included out of the box. As each business is different, this flexibility has been a tremendous asset to continue to help us grow.
  • Showcase their users' implementations.
A few key questions would be:
What level of support do they offer?
What ROI will this tool help us achieve?
What business needs will this help us solve now and in the future?
How will this tool impact my current website architecture?
How easy is this tool to use and what level of technical knowhow will our user need to have to be able to use?
How easy is it see the results of my test and be able to interpret these results into actionable items?
How does this tool integrate with other tools in my Marketing stack?

August 14, 2015

Optimizely Rocks

Renee Thompson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
My team uses Optimizely; we are responsible for conversion optimization across my company. I have 2 folks that work for me, and we are the 3 users. We are an online B2B media company, so we use Optimizely to run tests across our network of sites (~75 sites) and landing pages, with a goal of increasing conversions (leads, registrations) as well as engagement (primarily measured by pages per visit and time on site).
  • Stellar support. Every person we've worked with on the support side has been knowledgeable and super helpful. Top notch for sure, and a great attitude to go along with the support.
  • The product is so easy to use. Flexible while being user-friendly. We are able to do things quickly and easily that we could not do - even with consultant support - with competitive software.
  • Community. The online community is great - it has great content, frequently updated with lots of people contributing. Most questions can be answered by checking the online community/online support. The community manager, Amanda, rocks!
  • Reporting/exporting is a challenge if you want to report on data across multiple campaigns. This may not be an issue for some, but for us we typically have multiple test campaigns set up in support of a particular project. We compile/aggregate results manually. We have to look up/export results campaign by campaign, which is time-consuming.
  • While the product, development/engineering, support and community folks at Optimizely are rock stars, their sales folks are not. Most of the people have impressed us in so many ways - so very customer-oriented, as Optimizely tends to be as a company/brand. However, from our perspective it's felt a little like the sales folks are not even part of the same organization. Very 'traditional' salesy. :(
  • We'd like to be able to set up multiple 'projects' in Optimizely for better/easier organization. However, each project requires its own code snippet for your site(s). This precludes us from creating multiple projects, and thus it's a little unwieldy in our interface. Also, since we have so many sites and campaigns, our code snippet is much larger than we would like. This again is a symptom of our own organization, where we have many, many sites (unlike many other companies).
Honestly I think Optimizely works for any company - all industries/business types.
Brian DeLoach | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Optimizely is primarily used by our testing team though a few colleagues outside the team have access as well. We use Optimizely as our sole A/B testing, personalization and conversion rate optimization tool. We have used it to improve our registration flows, landing pages and to make our content more engaging.
  • The interface is extremely easy to use. If you are a novice, the WYSIWYG allows you to easily make simple changes to your site. If you are comfortable doing so there is also the code editor which is powerful enough for you to make dramatic changes to your site.
  • Optimizely's support is top notch. This was the primary reason we switched from our previous testing provider. They have extensive knowledge in scripting and are always quick to respond with useful information.
  • Optimizely has created a community of A/B testers and optimizers that allows us to share ideas with other groups.
  • Optimizely doesn't seem as buttoned up on the sales side as they are on the product and support side. Granted those other groups set a very high bar.
  • Optimizely doesn't have a useful engagement metric out of the box. You have to integrate your analytics platform with it which for us was a challenge.
  • We were grandfathered in from a Platinum plan which Optimizely no longer uses; they now have Enterprise and Starter I believe. We assumed since we had the Platinum plan that we were converted to the Enterprise plan but when we tried to access certain features we realized that wasn't the case.
If you plan to conduct A/B testing on your site or app, I haven't seen anything that's better than Optimizely.
George McMullen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Optimizely is used as a critical piece of understanding and testing user behavior by product, design, marketing, and engineering groups. It is used in multiple ways, from quick tests to see how users interact with buttons, hero images, promotional text, to test out operational changes and feature roll-outs, all the way to quantifying and proving hypotheses from in person user tests, surveys, and other qualitative data. From a platform perspective, Optimizely is used for web, mobile web, and mobile apps (iOS and Android). It's helpful to have a single platform for all your testing needs across different platforms as the teams already have enough other tools that are used on a daily basis to manage projects and analyze results.
  • When we started implementing Optimizely on mobile (iOS and Android), the team at Optimizely was particularly helpful in working with the engineers and product team. This really accelerated the process for us to dive in and get started using the product.
  • The Optimizely team seems very passionate about helping their customers get the most out of their platform. They are always available to answer an e-mail, support request, forum post, jump on a phone call and even come by for a visit. On the flip side, they are always asking for feedback on the product, which provides a sense that we are working with a living, breathing company.
  • Optimizely has spent a lot of time understanding the intricacies of multivariate testing and statistical analysis and made it dead simple to see the results in their product. Even if your focus isn't around data, you can plainly see how your experiments are performing and focus on what you are best at. If you want to learn more, they've provided a lot of resources to help you understand concepts like statistical significance.
  • I'd like to see more APIs to be able to export data and integrate it ina data warehouse so that we could perform our own analytics.
  • Sometimes it's not obvious how long an experiment will need to run based on a product's existing traffic. Having an estimate integrated directly into the experiment would be very helpful.
  • Sometimes I am concerned that they've made things too simple to get in and start running experiments, without having proper constructs on what experiments you should be running and what you are actually testing. Just because you've seen results on testing a button in an early stage of a funnel does not mean your end conversion is going to change.
It's great for doing both quick tests on UI/UX and for more involved tests that you've designed and experimented with on a qualitative basis. On both web and native mobile apps, it works flawlessly. From a mobile perspective, the team at Optimizely was incredibly helpful in getting us up and running. I do get a little concerned about the way it swizzles the UI elements when running simple UX/UI tests and have found some limitations in that, but for the most part I am running more advanced tests to begin with anyway.
Ishaan Bazaz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Optimizely for A/B testing. It's being used in the IT department to show if a hypothesis is true or false.
  • A/B Testing
  • Goals Results
  • Integration with GA
  • Storing unnecessary data
Optimizely is best for A/B testing.
Chad Wales | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are using Optimizely to confirm / disprove our hypothesis on our website. It is being used by IT and we work with our internal clients to set-up and run A/B tests. Optimizely enables us to remove bottlenecks through various funnels on our website.
  • Optimizely UX is very easy to use and find what you're looking for / set-up small changes on the site.
  • Customer service has been amazing.
  • There is a great user community that helps answer questions. Chances are, someone has run into the same issue you're experiencing.
  • In some instances page load speed can be affected by the Optimizely tag. Fortunately, in all cases that this has impacted a test, customer service has helped speed up the test.
  • Some changes require dev effort. It would be nice if the tool had more functionality to limit dev and design resources.
Optimizely is a great tool that lets you easily set up A/B tests. The learning curve is rather small and they have a great resource / training section that will allow you to be brought up to speed quickly. I've used multiple A/B testing platforms and Optimizely is by-far the most user friendly tool. When we did our POC for purchasing an A/B testing platform this was a huge deciding factor.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Optimizely makes sure that you can start testing with a plug and play approach. You don't have to worry about annoying set-ups, any organisation can start testing immediately. It makes sure that you can finally start addressing all your issues with a data driven approach.
  • Plug and Play
  • Transparent
  • Helpful
  • Make sure that other elements can be tested throughout a back-end experience as well.
What do I want to test? How many tests do I want to run?
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Optimizely mainly for testing marketing ideas. We use it to make sure the new hypotheses are not affecting our conversions in a negative way.
  • Ease of use, no need to involve the developers when we want to test on the front-end.
  • Stable platform. So far we never had any noticeable outings or downtime because of it.
  • Powerful tools for advanced users. Writing your own code and skipping the WYSIWYG editor is a breeze.
  • The company is industry leading, hence the pricing is adjusted accordingly. Makes sense for bigger companies, not so much for small businesses - unless of course they can leverage use on a daily basis with significant results.
It comes down to how much money are you willing to spend to learn more about how your customers react to your strategy.
David Shaw | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Optimizely is used to trial potential changes to our website so that we can ensure any changes that we make to our platform are actually improving our product. By A/B testing changes we can put a quantifiable number next to changes to show the impact that they have on the product and the business as a whole.
  • Easy to use
  • Analytics and data is easy to comprehend
  • Very fast learning curve to be using the product to its fullest!
  • Ability to auto-pause experiments at a set time.
If you have a website that generates revenue then you should be using it. It is likely best suited to eCommerce websites or for businesses who have highly trafficked landing pages as that will allow you to get a lot of data into the system a lot quicker and have results in a shorter period of time.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We decided to start using Optimizely to increase our A/B testing velocity. We already had an internal tool but it was not flexible enough to be able to run the number of experiments that we wanted to run and have the flexibility to turn on/off experiments out of the release cycle. We have an entire team dedicated to A/B testing with engineers, QA, and a product manager and designer. The team is responsible for the implementation of all our A/B tests; with Optimizely or our internal tool. I am the product owner and I am the person who interacts the most with Optimizely but everybody in my team uses it on a weekly basis.
  • Product is very easy to implement and to ramp up with. Even non developers can use it.
  • Extremely easy to manage your experiments, to turn them on/off and dashboard very user friendly.
  • Great capability for user targeting, traffic allocation, etc.
  • Reliable analytics tool (they've made a lot of progress in 2015 with their new results page).
  • Amazing team, very nice to work with, always on top of things and very efficient technical support.
  • Using Optimizely has enabled us to double our testing velocity.
  • We also use optimizely for promotion campaign or quick bug fixes.
  • Sometimes the software can be slow, the dashboard takes some time to load, etc.
  • We still use our internal tool for more complex tests with back-end part.
  • I am still paranoid about the flicker and don't use Optimizely for big tests if it is above the fold.
What kind of tests do you want to run? Quick Front end changes or big layout changes?
Do you have another tool for back-end tests?
John Freeborn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Optimizely for A/B testing on our mobile and desktop, consumer facing web properties. We started by keeping it e-commerce focused, but we've expanded the use to all areas of the site including marketing, promotions, and e-commerce.

Before Optimizely we had no tools to do A/B testing (beyond inacurate Google Analytics week by week changes) so this was a huge upgrade and allowed us to quickly iterate, experiment and learn from our users.
  • You can set up an experiment without any assistance from your IT staff (after implementation). We don't have to request and wait. We just create a test, deploy and learn.
  • The software is fairly easy to use, flexible and powerful–even for a non-coder.
  • The reporting is really easy to digest and gets you a detailed picture of your test and your testing goals. If you choose to implement the test 100% that is simply a click away.
  • The reporting could be better, maybe more standard. We use Google Analytics on top of the Optimizely reports to verify and dig deeper.
  • If you aren't careful you could easily break your site. This isn't a flaw exactly, but is a potential pitfall.
  • I've heard complaints from IT staff that Optimizely adds too much weight to the page loads.
If you don't have A/B testing tools in your systems then Optimizely is a great, easy to use tool. If you lack IT resources to experiment or iterate than here's a way to do that on your own. For my company, one of the key issues was finding the time and resources internally to make the best use of Optimizely. I had other responsibilities. We ended up hiring an A/B testing partner to kickstart our testing program. This was a huge help.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We have been using Optimizely in the Digital Marketing Department but are serving the whole company. With this tool we test the hypothesis made by product managers to see if they can improve our overall sales. On the other side we are using it as a CMS to fix different types of issues on our webpage as it is really easy and controllable.
  • A/B testing configuration ease & deployment
  • A/B testing results
  • Content managment system through Javascript
  • Personalizating different audiences
  • Mobile App for account management
  • Mobile Web responsive
  • Results Exporting
  1. Scenarios recommended when internal decisions are based on "beliefs" with many sides and point of views
  2. Recommended when implementation timing gets too long for minor changes
  3. Recommended for segmenting audiences and personalizing experiences
  4. Recommended from short businesses to big ones
  5. Support is one of the best things Optimizely has
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We perform A/B tests and improve user experience with the tool.
  • It's very easy to set up tests
  • Their tech support is amazing
  • it gives very quick and strong results.
  • I would have liked to see improvements with the sitecatalyst integration.
I love Optimizely's API. We had a specific scenario that we needed to execute. Optimizely was the only tool that fit our need. It truly is best-in-class.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
The business intelligence and digital product teams are primarily using optimizely and my company. we are at the stage where we are trying to get buy-in from the editorial team as well as the rest of the company. we are using it to try to move the ticker on both traffic and engagement on our websites.
  • Testing CTAs (calls to action)
  • Simple HTML changes
  • Measurement
  • Analytics Integration (Google, SiteSatalyst, etc.)
  • Easy to use visual editor
  • customer support
  • Hard to run significant tests without a major development investment on our side--it seemed like it would be a lot easier to implement tests without the help of our dev team
  • Seems slightly less well-suited for media sites or sites where the KPIs are more complex than e-commerce sites (simpler KPIs such as click here or buy now)
It definitely seems well-suited for e-commerce sites or basic marketing sites. it's a little trickier for media sites, but i don't think this is specific to Optimizely, more to the site you are trying to implement testing on. the tool is especially suitable if you want to change the size, color, style, etc. of buttons or calls to action on your website.
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