A Powerful Tool, but with Power Comes Responsibility
November 22, 2019

A Powerful Tool, but with Power Comes Responsibility

Jon Lindemann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely

Our Insights & Analytics team is using Optimizely. Some other teams also use it if they need to insert some JavaScript onto a page to test other functionality (such as a chatbot).

It allows us to perform minor A/B testing to determine which changes customers respond to when browsing our site and purchasing our products.

Pros

  • Insert code as the page is rendering. This can be helpful for quick visual fixes or inserting code for testing.
  • Performing A/B testing for minor visual changes to the site.
  • Collecting all tests in a single interface that allows multiple people to see what's being tested.

Cons

  • It slows down the rendering of a webpage because it's a third-party script. If you set it to render asynchronously or after the page is rendered, you see flickering.
  • This may be how it's implemented, but our web team typically has no idea when tests are going live as there are no notifications set up. Things can get broken on the site without us knowing.
  • There's no easy way to see what tests are running and what they affect without going into the management interface.
  • It has helped us experiment without doing deployments or having our development team write code.
  • It has added some confusion and is "yet another thing somebody else is doing to mess up our site."
  • It has informed some of our checkout designs/implementations.
I haven't personally tested anything else aside from Optimizely.
It's great if you want to do quick and easy testing by inserting a third-party script onto your page. It is also great to make quick visual fixes when a deployment isn't possible.

It's not great (at least it isn't great if you aren't using self-hosting/Optimizely Edge) if you want to have optimal website performance.

Optimizely Web Experimentation Feature Ratings

7.0
a/b experiment testing
8
Split URL testing
8
Multivariate testing
8
Multi-page/funnel testing
8
Cross-browser testing
5
Mobile app testing
5
Test significance
8
Visual / WYSIWYG editor
8
Advanced code editor
5
Page surveys
7
Visitor recordings
7
Preview mode
6
Test duration calculator
7
Experiment scheduler
7
Experiment workflow and approval
7
Dynamic experiment activation
7
Client-side tests
8
Server-side tests
7
Mutually exclusive tests
7
7.0
Standard visitor segmentation
7
Behavioral visitor segmentation
7
Traffic allocation control
7
Website personalization
7
7.0
Heatmap tool
8
Click analytics
7
Scroll maps
7
Form fill analysis
7
Conversion tracking
7
Goal tracking
7
Test reporting
8
Results segmentation
6
CSV export
6
Experiments results dashboard
7
Platform Integration Features ()
Not Rated

Using Optimizely

I think it's useable but definitely could be a bit less confusing. I've logged into the interface and not known where to go to see exactly what's running right then.

Optimizely Reliability

It's scalable, but to optimize its performance, you need to self-host or use Optimizely Edge.

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