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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

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 (95)
    9.3
    93%
  • Standard visitor segmentation (87)
    8.9
    89%
  • Test significance (87)
    8.5
    85%
  • Preview mode (85)
    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: 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 Videos

Optimizely Web Experimentation Competitors

Optimizely Web Experimentation Technical Details

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

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

(495)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(76-100 of 180)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization uses Optimizely for both B2B and B2C marketing. We use it to personalize customer experiences on our eCommerce site, as well as to test new experiences before we implement them.
  • Swapping out content, such as banners or icons.
  • Personalizing a landing page based on URL parameters for non-organic or direct traffic.
  • Testing new site experiences before developing them fully to validate the business case for the change.
  • The integration with Google Analytics is not great.
  • Designing changes for responsive design usually requires building a custom extension.
  • It can slow down page loads if you don't do a good job archiving audiences and experiments when no longer in use.
I would absolutely recommend Optimizely to a colleague because it has proven itself worth the effort of implementing is. Optimizely makes personalization for email segments a breeze, with measurable effects on revenue. In general, the measurability is Optimizely's greatest strength. Every change we implement, we implement as a 50/50 split in Optimizely and make sure we can justify the cost of development.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely for testing our website. It is used across the organization, including marketing and production.
  • Implementing test changes.
  • Managing multiple tests.
  • Understanding statistical significance.
  • Onboarding the tool requires a lot of support.
  • "Offline events" is still in beta.
Best use case: web experimentation for simple metrics, such as CTR.
Less appropriate: testing on offline metrics, such as revenue.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We recently launched a newly designed website, and at first, we relied on Optimizely to implement "hotfixes" for issues until we could deploy the next code release. Recently, we've been focused on testing the optimization of the checkout flow. We've also been using it to test new features on the site before spending the time and resources on a fully developed solution. Our team is very lean, so Optimizely is primarily used by our agency partner responsible for web analytics, but a few of my colleagues and I use it as well.
  • A user-friendly (usability) interface for day to day experience setup and monitoring.
  • A novice can easily set up simple experiments, but an advanced user can set up more complex experiments with code/etc.
  • Customer service, customer support, and support architects are impressively responsive and knowledgable.
  • I just received an auto-generated notification that we've used 80% of our impressions in the first three months of our contract (yikes!!!!). I had mistakenly been going off visitors and thought we were ok. I had to dig for a while to even find where these this logged, and even then I'm not sure which experiments are burning through the impressions. I had to negotiate (internally) to get the budget for the expanded contract to the higher tier with more impressions, so I'm not sure whether I'll be able to talk my way into a mid-year budget review to further expand/extend my contract. Otherwise, I'm guessing I'll have to shut down Optimizely for the next nine months. Bottom line: I felt entirely blindsided by the lack of visibility for how many impressions we were burning through.
Great for hotfixes, and both simple and complex experiments. Apparently (per my early comment about being blindsided about the impressions we were burning through), it's not well suited for any experiments that run across multiple pages, such as global navigation.
César Costas Carrera | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used by one team so far. It helps to address two problems: we do A/B testing, so we set up the tests and keep track of the results with Optimizely. We also wrap new developments into A/B tests so we can measure if we made a mistake towards the client's outcome, even if the expected result is to be flat (A being as good as B).
  • The traffic reports don't seem to be far from our internal traffic reports.
  • Non-coders appreciate the interface and graphs.
  • It's slow at loading and it's blocking, so it damages your site performance.
  • It uses a naive approach, where two tests running in the same page are still two A/B tests, not an A/B/C, damaging the results due to interference.
Optimizely is appropriate for promotional landing pages and small numbers of tests. It is not appropriate for big projects or for SEO landing pages.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely mostly in one team; other teams are aware and looking into starting to use it. We're using Optimizely's Web Experimentation product for frontend A/B testing.
  • Easy set up of simpler A/B tests.
  • Semi real-time results dashboard.
  • Easy integration with in-house analytics.
  • Good API documentation.
  • No i18n support by default - we had to build it for ourselves.
  • For ease of use, some complexity is hidden away which you would need to understand in order to optimize your site's page load time.
  • The audit trail is almost unusable, as the history view lacks a lot of basic features.
  • There's no way to do a proper approval workflow.
For testing simple frontend changes, it's usually a good fit. If you can use another A/B testing solution which is closer to the backend, sometimes it's cleaner to implement tests that way. Sometimes the way how the experiment is defined outside the scope of the code which is being modified makes it a bit harder to properly implement the winning variant.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely is being used to A/B test experiments on our website. It addresses the issue of guessing or making intuition-based decisions about which copy/layout/etc. leads to increases in various conversion metrics.
  • Optimizely did a good job of defining a developer interface for the business problem at hand.
  • Running multiple experiments is done well by Optimizely.
  • Audience targeting.
  • The full stack Python SDK made a synchronous request to Optimizely for every call just to activate users. This was too much for a critical piece of our functionality.
  • I found the environments concept a little clunky.
  • Does not fee like a unified product across web/full stack.
I have not had experience working with other A/B testing platforms or solutions, so I would be hesitant to give a strong recommendation one way or the other until I became more informed myself.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely is being used primarily by our Digital Marketing org for testing the success of new features and components on Salesforce.com.
  • Tech support.
  • Great WYSIWYG.
  • Reliable results.
  • Larger footprint than IT is happy with (Slower Page Speed).
  • Conflicts between varying running experiments and our current tech stack running.
  • Content flash (Page loads then changes in front of user).
Suited for smaller A/B testing variations - Not suited for larger changes to page(s).
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it across 10 to 15 sites, all to test UI/UX, SEO, and conversions.
  • User Support: you can see that they at least try to take care of their customers.
  • The tool was moderately useful for A/B testing with a decently friendly UX/UI.
  • Made the mistake of changing prices on existing customers for the same or less features.
  • Still drags down page performance.
I'm sure Optimizely is suited for anything that has users. The problem really is in the current pricing. Funny thing is, they'll fight like no tomorrow to keep you and reduce their prices, however, it's still not worth it for fewer features. This is seriously a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Emily Emmer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely has been used by the marketing department for 6+ years. A/B testing with Optimizely helps us make changes after we've tested impact with our site visitors. We've also used Optimizely as a quick fix for any site issues when resolving through developer resources will be too cumbersome.
  • Simple technical interface that allows for marketing-centric A/B testing, it pulls the power of experimentation back into Marketing's wheelhouse.
  • Excellent support resources: It's easy to get customer support on the phone and they're fully equipped to resolve issues.
  • Great training and certification resources.
  • Limited visibility to product roadmap and ability to influence that roadmap.
  • Mandatory transition to new platform with no access to previous testing was inconvenient (2018).
  • Creating swim-lane testing for tests with the same conversion metric is a bit cumbersome.
Optimizely is a great A/B testing tool for any size business. The Optimizely platform democratizes A/B testing through a simple interface, excellent training tools, easy implementation and low dependence on IT resources. Utilizing Optimizely I've been able to run robust experimentation programs with a variety of resources (acting as a 1-person team with limited access to IT resources as well as managing a team with high access to resources). Additionally, Optimizely is well-priced and positioned to be affordable for a variety of business sizes.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by a small team within a department primarily for A/B testing. For example, to promote user registration, we might want to test out a new feature which could be anything from a new design for the registration section or a mini-standalone application. Before rolling it out en masse, we would test this out in a limited scope to compare relative registration levels.
  • Can target a feature to a specific audience like desktop Chrome users only.
  • Can do multiple layers of A/B testing.
  • Can roll out a new design test in a matter of hours.
  • The webapp itself is sometimes slow to load.
  • The code change difference is one giant string, would be easier if formatted for readability.
It is just a good quick tool for doing a lot of simple A/B tests. It can scale to more complicated experiments and the metrics can also get sophisticated. From a developer's perspective, it is very straightforward for me to use. I am a lot less certain about the statistical significance area when the results are actually being interpreted but from a developer's perspective, it's just easy to use.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely to test our online ticketing and donation systems, to try to increase revenue and conversion.
  • Easy integration with our website and systems.
  • Makes it easy for any average user to set up and deploy tests.
  • Use of custom Javascript has expanded the reach of our tests.
There are a lot of instances where we don't have enough traffic to reach statistical significance, so this either creates tests that never have outcomes or just makes changes without testing and monitoring results instead of testing.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely across several teams and departments for front-end A/B and multivariate testing.
  • Faster test deployment
  • Immediate access to test results
  • Helpful customer support team
  • Testing on back-end requires using Optimizely's full stack, so it doesn't come with Optimizely X
  • If you ever need to use the change log, it's very bare bones
It's great for front-end related tests, specifically for when you're testing design element changes, CTA changes, copy changes across the page, and website navigation changes.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely is being used across all verticals in my business. We primarily use it for testing new features and ads. But we also use it to implement quick fixes to minor issues on the site such as non-compliant text or typos until a final fix can be deployed.
  • Making the changes to your page is pretty simple, just click on an element and edit the code.
  • Has great scheduling functionality.
  • Partitioning of experiments by project makes it all run faster and is easier to organize.
  • Actual creation of an A/B test is confusing and difficult (like the differences between Pages vs URLs etc.).
  • Setting up a URL Redirect Experiment is so convoluted it seems like it's not even a feature Optimizely wants you to use. Instead, it's like I'm tricking Optimizely into alternating between 2 URLs. That really needs to be cleaned up as it would be very helpful.
Well suited for:
  1. Color and copy changes.
  2. Technical functionality that needs to deploy after the page loads.
  3. Deploying these changes across large sections of a site.
Not well suited for:
  1. Alternating between 2 URLs.
  2. Where tracking is needed at the user level.
  3. Implementing large changes on page load. You'll get a flash.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely throughout the company to deploy both AB tests as 100% fixes.
  • Clear UI
  • Super customizable
  • To be honest I can't think of any big downside.
Very suitable for large companies. Not suitable for the smaller ones as ROI would be too small due too pricing.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used by the whole organization to support testing for different brands.
  • Intuitive enough to set up a simple A/B test for any user
  • Being able to selecting testing components on the site
  • Reporting
  • Debugging feature
  • Debugging feature could be improved. It doesn't always work perfectly!
Well suited for anyone wanting to do experimentation.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely to organize, test, and make decisions about our project ideas. Both the Marketing and Development teams can access the tool to input new ideas, and monitor ideas in testing.
  • The separation between idea organization (PM) and test experimentation.
  • Clean, easily navigable interface.
  • Integration with tools like JIRA and Slack makes it easy to stay organized.
  • The analysis input is not obvious and requires a few too many clicks to find an update.
  • A few UX tweaks can make a big difference - ex. in PM, you need to click a section, then click again to start typing. One click should be enough.
  • Allow deletion of PM categories.
It is excellent for A/B testing front end changes of any kind. It is not as easy to test pricing.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are utilising the Optimizely A/B and Personalisation platform to facilitate the optimisation of our core website. It is used daily by the CRO specialist to implement tests and personalisation campaigns. We harness insights from our data, and Optimizely allows us to realise our hypothesis through testing.
  • Simple UX, easy to navigate
  • Powerful targeting and audience creation
  • Flexible and able to handle all our testing demands
  • Ability to save JS and CSS changes at the same time when using the code editor
  • A way to organise active tests into groups
  • A way to delete unnecessary archive tests and campaigns
If a business is looking to start A/B testing, Optimizely is simple enough to start but has scalability for when a businesses experimentation program develops.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely has allowed the marketing team to run smaller scale tests without support from the development team, but it has also worked well in larger scale testing where the dev team has had to build the test within Optimizely.
  • Easy element selector. Users don't need to know code to pick out certain elements.
  • Audience inclusions and exclusions list is easy to use and straight forward.
  • Clear reporting dashboard allows you to see the results and understand them quickly.
  • On some tests, it takes a while to set up metrics, e.g. redirect tests. It is hard to set up metrics for both the original page and the redirect page.
Really good for being able to set up quick experiments for users who aren't familiar with code or don't want to make code changes.
Emanuell Dan Minciu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely is currently being used across multiple teams within the business. Its main purpose is to help us improve our products by finding out from customers how our ideas perform during A/B testing. Currently, our team has been running tests weekly for over 6 months. Optimizely is a great tool which makes this process easy and painless.
  • User-friendly - it's super easy and intuitive to create and launch a test
  • Fast - the app itself runs smoothly and the whole process of launching a test can be as quick as a few minutes
  • Clear feedback - you get a detailed summary of how your test performs (be it either good or bad)
  • Expand on the API - build on the current documentation with the aim of helping developers move tests in their own codebases
One of Optimizely use cases is helping improve your products by finding out from customers how your ideas perform during A/B testing. The tool makes this process easy and painless.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are an Optimizely agency community partner and have been working with our clients to support them on their website experimentation initiatives. For some clients, it's owned and executed by a demand/lead generation team, which is responsible for lead production from calls, the website, etc. Other clients, however, are part of marketing teams and have some ownership of the brand website, but not all, which limits or hinders our ability to test.
  • Very User-friendly
  • Large, Robust Source of Documentation and Use Cases
  • Optimizely-Based Support
  • Knowledge Community
  • Expensive SaaS - probably most expensive of it's kind in the marketplace
  • No Freemium model, which forces me to recommend other tools to our clients who are just getting started in testing
I believe Optimizely to be the best in its class, but the expense of the platform makes it difficult to project its ROI.
Ashley Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely is currently being used for our CRO programme to run A/B testing as well as smaller personalisation campaigns. This currently sits solely within the product team to make quick front end changes and testing. This helps to address and resolve user experience issues, styling and formatting issues as well as ensure we are testing within the right areas.
  • Easy to use platform with an easy to use WYSIWYG editor for non-technical people.
  • Specific personalisation suite to enable effective use of 1:1 personalisation on landing pages.
  • Accurate statistcal modelling to ensure confidence in results.
  • Assistance with on-boarding the tool as opossed to using a partner.
  • Dedicated training on the tool for internal business users both on the development and consultancy side.
  • Impression usage should be applied to running AB tests only - Development teams need to take some time to implement a winning variation and so using impressions to temporarily run a winning experience is not ideal.
Well suited to make quick amends to existing issues on site. Althought I don't believe the platform should be used for this purpose for too long. With the program management tool, Optimizely enables users from across the business to share ideas and collobarate and prioritise testing efficiently. There are many ways to QA an experience but changes to the QA tool such as being able to trigger different experiences and/or variations on or off would be ideal.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely is being used across the whole organization. It helps to give our customers more personalization and optimization. We use it for A/B testing. Every team is allowed to use it autonomously and if there is any problem or question there is the Optimization team that provides support. I have been using it for one year, managing experiments and features. I find it very powerful and easy to use.
  • Features flag managing
  • Experiment managing
  • Optimizely goes beyond classic A/B testing and allows you to manage many different variants.
  • I like it and I'm not able to provide you improvement.
In my opinion, Optimizely should not be abused. Sometimes having in the same time on the same component more than 6/7 tests can add complexity. It is well suited when there is a clear vision of what we want to test, how to do it, and why we are doing this test.
William Sargent | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely is being used primarily with our product managers within one department. It has allowed us to use experimentation to prove our hypothesis that have directly affected change for our public facing membership webpages.
  • The tech support has been outstanding.
  • The online documentation is very well written. It makes it easy for us to solve our own challenges.
  • The analytics reporting has been very helpful for us to understand what our audience likes and dislikes.
  • I would have liked to use the Full Stack product, but it was just too expensive to justify its additional cost.
  • I would have liked more control over user permissions and global controls over all experiments.
  • Integration of third-party software was confusing at first.
I would recommend using Optimizely for any website with an ecommerce component as it has the potential to pay for itself if you use a UX Designer and a Front End Developer to implement your experiment ideas.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for experimentation on new product features. It is being used by more than one department and helps in understanding customer choices.
  • Random allocation in A/B Tests
  • KPI Monitoring
  • Experimentation
  • Version Control
  • Traffic Allocation Insights
A/B testing of traffic is the best scenario for Optimizely.

Other use cases requiring detailed metrics is something that Optimizely is less appropriate for.
Jared Gardner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely to do all the web site testing and optimization in the Marketing department.
  • Integrates with most digital marketing tools well.
  • Library features make it easy to reuse metrics, goals, and pages.
  • Endless ways of executing a test.
  • Great thought leadership and training.
  • Being able to target analytics audiences is limiting compared to Google and Adobe products.
  • UI looks nice but its layout a little weird IMO.
Really one of the top tier testing tools, there are very little things it can't do. The personalization add-ons can get expensive though. I wish you could use audiences from GA or Adobe Analytics (and Audience platforms) to target tests, besides that, I have not real complaints.
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