Simple, powerful tool to help your website be its best
June 10, 2014

Simple, powerful tool to help your website be its best

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Gold Plan

Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely

Optimizely is being used by the Marketing team to conduct A/B tests on our eCommerce website to help increase conversion and average order value, as well as to quickly and easily make cosmetic changes until the development team can catch up and implement them on the back-end. Prior to using Optimizely, we had no way to properly test our theories about website changes, and cosmetic changes could take weeks or months before development would be able to implement them.
  • Super simple A/B testing - An easy-to-use interface allows up to very quickly set up variations on a page design and run a test and see the results in a clear and easy to understand report.
  • Powerful code editing capability - With some creativity, the script editor allows any number of changes to our website, including adding all-new content and completely restyling pages with scoped CSS.
  • Multiple experiments, multiple variations - Able to try multiple things across multiple pages, even changes to different parts of the same web page in different experiments, and it all just works.
  • Sometimes page redirects simply do not work - Running an A/B test that redirects visitors to our homepage to new variation pages, occasionally a user will get dropped on the old homepage instead of their assigned variation.
  • There isn't great visibility on older experiments - If a user is assigned to a variation that has been "turned off", they'll continue to see that variation and it's possible to forget about them. Some kind of warning message could be useful. Possible to work around by duplicating experiments when disabling variations, but that comes with its own issues.
  • The new results pages feel like they're missing functionality/information compared to the old page - The old page definitely had room for improvement, but the new page feels like a step in the wrong direction. Could just be unfamiliar with it, but I'll stick with the old results page as long as I can.
  • Quick design updates - Sometimes our owner wants to see certain cosmetic changes on the website, and Optimizely has allowed us to make those changes as quickly as they can be designed, rather than having to wait for a development cycle.
  • Conversion rate has increased - We've been able to test several variations, particularly on product pages, which have led to a statistically significant and noticeable uptick in conversion rate, leading to more sales overall.
  • Business direction has changed - Based on the results of our A/B testing, we're more focused in on specific areas where we can make changes and see results. And we have the A/B testing data to verify that things are working as expected.
I've used Mobify, which is not an A/B testing tool, but which uses a similar system to hook into the base code of a web page and change it for specific viewers. Optimizely has proven to be far more user-friendly and robust, while still retaining the power and flexibility you want from a tool like this. We have not evaluated any other A/B testing tools.
There's still plenty of room for improvement on our website, and Optimizely is the tool of choice to help us find those areas and iterate on them. In fact, we hope to upgrade our plan to get even more support from the Optimizely team and tap in to their expertise to help us advance our business goals even further.
Optimizely is a strong product which appears to work seamlessly under any platform. If you have a constantly changing code-base or outside developers that like to change CSS class names without warning then you could run in to some terrible results, but that's more of an organizational issue than an Optimizely one. I feel that anyone could benefit from A/B testing, and also anyone could have some fun with it. I whole-heartedly recommend Optimizely as a platform to anyone with an interest in A/B testing.