User Friendly Insight to Your Site
June 11, 2014
User Friendly Insight to Your Site
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Gold
Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely
We use Optimizely in the marketing team to test specific changes to our corporate site. We use it to find ways to increase our conversion rates and other key metrics.
- Optimizely's user interface is easy to use and you don't need to have coding experience. This makes it easy for anyone to pick up and start working with it.
- They provide excellent and attentive support. I have called in to their support line a few times to ask questions about how to best do something in their software and they were always very easy to work with and helped me solve my problems.
- Test results are clear and easy to read. They have great graphs and tables to help you see how different variations performed, how likely a variation is to beat the baseline, and how well that stacks up against other variations. Even with multivariate tests, the results are clear and concise.
- The ability to add custom JavaScript and CSS per test is very convenient and makes it easy to make more detailed changes right from within Optimizely.
- Traffic allocation options are convenient and allow you to easily split traffic to different variations.
- While their user interface and WYSIWYG editor is mostly straight forward, sometimes the variation code it generates behind the scenes can become a little convoluted and bloated. While you don't need to worry about this for basic changes and variations, I have come across certain tests when I've needed to work with this code to make sure my project code wasn't gigantic and slowed down the page load times. Advanced users may need to know a little more about their variation code works and it would be nice if Optimizely would do a little more behind the scenes to keep this code size down, maybe by optimizing your changes instead of just putting each line of code in exactly as you did in the WYSIWYG editor.
- We have seen some possible negative impacts on SERP rankings and Google AdWords quality score when running Optimizely tests on pages. We have done several tests and seen mixed results so we can't say for sure how much/if Optimizely is affecting these, but I would just warn users to keep on eye on these metrics when running tests. We have also not seen any definitive answers or test results on this from Optimizely themselves, only that the creators are ex-Googlers so if anyone knew how to make a platform that worked well with Google it would be them. It would be nice if they would directly address these issues and maybe put out the results of some internal testing regarding the matter.
- I haven't noticed an easy way to edit text formatting (font, size, bold, italic, etc.) in the WYSIWYG editor. You can do it by editing the HTML, but for beginning users it would be nice to just have a visual editor when you click "Edit Text" on an element.
- It has helped us increase conversion rates on specific pages and elements on pages.
- It has helped us increase the efficiency of the employees working on and rolling out tests because it is easy to use and activate a test on our site.
- It has given us more insight in to the effects we can expect when changing elements on pages instead of just making blind guesses and hoping for the best.