Visual Website Optimizer

We have been working silently and regularly releasing lots of new features. Some Visual Website Optimizer users and customers may have noticed these features already. This post is an official announcement of all the new features which have been released in past few months. What made us wait so long to announce?

Brand new website design!

Yes, we were waiting for an overhaul of our website before announcing the new features. Working with the most excellent Jesse (of 31Three.com), we came up with a new color scheme, jazzed up the logo and gave different pages an uplift (especially, homepage, case studies and features pages). Here’s how our homepage looks now:

Do you like our new design? Any improvement ideas or comments?

New test designer with tons of features

We released this update long back, but haven’t formally announced it. To make creation of variations even easier for marketers, we made test designer much more intuitive and enhanced its functionality.

These are the new features in test designer:

• More options to change elements (move, resize, rearrange, hide, remove, change link, change text, etc.)
• Better image uploader and inbuilt image editor (crop, rotate, resize, color images within VWO)
• Unlimited undo and redo (make mistakes, and then simply undo those mistakes!)
• Save test as draft (you can work on the same test in multiple shifts)
• List of modifications (if you want to remove one of the changes in an A/B test, you can do that from list of modifications)

Our features page has a short video that shows new editor in action. Do take a look to see just how much the editor has improved recently!

Geo-behavioral targeting

This is a feature that has got us most excited! In A/B test, you create two versions of your website and then any incoming visitor will see one of those two versions. Finally, you measure which version produced more sales and conversions. So far, so good. However, what if different types of visitors react differently to different versions? Probably visitors from New York who came to your site via Facebook respond better to version A, but visitors from London respond better to version B? How can you personalize your website and landing pages so different visitors see a version that maximizes conversion rate for them?

This geo-behavioral targeting feature lets you create multiple variations/offers/content and then target specific variations to specific segment of visitors. So, if you have 5 variations, you can target each one of them to be only shown to a particular kind of visitor. Cool, right?

We have multiple targeting options: country, city, browser, mobile device (iPad, iPhone, Android, etc.), referring website, returning or new visitor, cookie value, ad campaign, etc. You can combine these targeting options to create a very complex kind of segment.

Usability testing

So you have decided to A/B test your website, but how do you know what you could be testing? You can either get ideas from A/B testing case studies, or read posts such as 23 A/B testing ideas. But if you need personalized suggestions about what to test on your website, you are on your own (unless you hire a conversion rate optimization agency).

For benefit of our users, we have come up with a usability testing feature called What to Test. What this feature allows you is to ask our panel of users (sourced from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) what they think about your website or landing page, and thereby get A/B testing and usability improvement ideas. You can ask any question you want (for example “Do you think our headline is simple and effective?”), or you could choose questions from our pre-defined list (we have collated best usability testing questions). Upon starting the process, within a few days, you will get a report with feedback from users. See an example below:

We hope you use this feature and get lots of new A/B testing ideas!

Other improvements in Visual Website Optimizer

This is not all! We have made many other improvements in Visual Website Optimizer:

• Google Analytics integration is codeless now (no need to change any code. Simply select the integration option while making a test, see details here)
• Treat variation as a base for calculations (as a default, control is the base for calculating percentage improvement, chance to beat original and other metrics in report. Now you can select any variation as the base, and see calculations relative to it)
• Asynchronous code (huge page load speed improvements now possible by switching to new asynchronous code snippet, see details here)

Business and team updates!

We have our very own team blog where we keep announcing what Wingify Boys are up to! Here are the salient points on what’s happening in the company:

• We’re a team of 10 people now
• We crossed 1200 paying customers within first 2 years of incorporation
• We moved to a larger and better equipped office
• Yep, we’re still bootstrapped

If you think we’re a fun company and would like to be our part, we’re hiring (all the time!)

Phew! What’s next?

We have already started working on next big set of features. In case you have any specific feature requests, suggestions or comments, you are always welcome to email them to us at info@wingify.com

We’re very excited about the future of testing and optimization, and hope you are too..

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Any (synchronous) external or 3rd party JavaScript code you add on your website has potential to slow down your website. A vendor who says your website won’t slow down is probably lying. And, as every marketer knows today, page load time is pretty important. It affects your conversion rate and search rankings.

We are committed to our customers’ site speeds and therefore proud to announce immediate availability of asynchronous code snippet for Visual Website Optimizer (VWO). This new code snippet has been months into development and refinement, and now we are first A/B testing vendor to come up with an asynchronous code snippet and are very excited about it! If you are a Visual Website Optimizer user, we highly recommend you to update your code snippet to new asynchronous one.

What is Asynchronous loading?

Essentially, instead of loading VWO code and your website sequentially, asynchronous code will load both in parallel, thereby speeding up your website load. See following graphic to understand it fully:

Advantages of Asynchronous code snippet:

• Much faster website loading: asynchronous code snippet loads variations and other data in parallel to your website loading, so unlike earlier synchronous code, your website loading is not stalled until we have loaded variation data and other VWO code. With new code snippet, all JavaScript code and variation data loads parallely.
• Fallback to control in case our servers are unavailable: in a rare and unlikely case our servers are unresponsive or take some time to respond, a timeout will happen and your original page will be shown. As history shows, even though it is rare, due to network unavailability or DDOS attacks, even best networks and servers can become unresponsive. The asynchronous code snippet has a timeout setting (default is 2 seconds, but is configurable — see below), and if our servers or Content Distribution Network (CDN, currently Amazon’s Cloudfront) don’t respond within that time, your normal page will get displayed.

How to get Asynchronous code?

Login to your Visual Website Optimizer account, and go to ‘Get Tracking Code‘ section (under Tools tab).

Settings available in Asynchronous code

In code snippet, you will find two variables that you can adjust (although we recommend keeping default values intact).

• settings_tolerance=2000 this is the maximum time (in milliseconds) for which the code snippet will wait for test settings to arrive from our servers. If no settings arrive within this period, timeout will happen and your original page will get displayed (test won’t run in this case, as fallback has happened).
• library_tolerance=1500 this is the maximum time (in milliseconds) for which the code snippet will wait for our JavaScript library to get downloaded from Content Distribution Network (Amazon Cloudfront). If no file arrives within this period, timeout will happen and your original page will get displayed (test won’t run in this case, as fallback has happened).

Note that in normal circumstances, all the data and files that need to be download will get downloaded in 100-200 milliseconds, so the timeout is an absolutely maximum threshold and can safely be kept as it is.

If you decrease the threshold, one side effect of it would be that some visitors (with slower connections or with have local ISP/network issues) may not be able to become a part of your test (because timeout occurred for them), so you may potentially lose some visitors or conversions registered in your A/B test.

Compatibility of Asynchronous code snippet

The new code snippet is compatible with all browsers. WordPress, Joomla , Magento and Drupal plugins are available. (We are currently working to update Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst  plugins)

Highly recommended: use new Asynchronous code

Because of numerous advantages of new asynchronous code snippet, we highly recommend you to start using it as soon as possible. In case you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us at support@wingify.com

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Yep, that’s true! Our private investigators went to North Pole and caught Santa A/B testing gifts with little Eskimo kids. Apparently, ahead of worldwide gift distribution that is to happen soon, Santa wanted to be 100% sure that his choice of this year’s gifts “clicked” with kids. Don’t believe me? Well, here’s a pic to prove Santa is really an effective experimenter:

To really get into mood for A/B testing, Santa was also (rightly) wearing a chain inspired by Visual Website Optimizer logo .

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

This blog post may be last one for year 2011, so I wanted to wish all blog readers a joyful Christmas and an exciting new year. May 2012 brings you happiness, smiles and bountiful supply of extra sales and conversions

By the way, did you notice our cool new Xmas inspired logo (above)?

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Happy Halloween! We have been working hard on improving Visual Website Optimizer by continuously adding features and enhancements. Before I tell which new features we have added lately (and in case you haven’t noticed yet), here’s a peek at the Google-style Halloween themed doodle we drew for our logo.

New security features in Visual Website Optimizer

For us, ensuring security of customers’ data and website is of utmost importance. We know that some of our customers may be (rightly) fanatic about activity in their Visual Website Optimizer account (as it can potentially impact their websites). For the record, these are some of the existing features of our security architecture:

• Our login and signup pages are on HTTPS (secure pages)
• We don’t store your passwords in plaintext so even we don’t know what your passwords are (we salt and hash them)
• We prevent wrong login attempts by showing a captcha after 3 consecutive incorrect login attempts

To this list of security features, we have added two new options:

1. Account activity alerts

If you enable this feature, your account administrators or you will start getting email alerts about any activity happening in your account (that can potentially affect your live website or account settings). So, if someone from your team is making changes to a currently running test or someone creates a new test and makes it live, you will get notifications about that. These alerts will help account administrator detect any unauthorized activity and take preventive measures towards it.

2. Only allow logins from specific IPs

Anyone with your username and password can potentially login to your account and make changes to your website. To prevent such unauthorized access, you can now specify if you would like to limit logins to your account only from specific IPs (or range of IPs). This will ensure that your account can only be accessed from those specific IPs. But do make sure that you don’t inadvertently block yourself out of your Visual Website Optimizer account.

Custom split ratios among variations

This is a neat little feature that has been requested by many users. By default, Visual Website Optimizer splits traffic among variations in equal proportions. So, if you are doing A/B/C test, that split will be 33%, 33% and 33%. But in few cases, users may want unequal split and this new feature will allow them to specify any ratio they want traffic to be distributed into.

Halloween gift: unlimited simultaneous tests

Earlier, we limited the number of tests you can run simultaneously according to plan you had subscribed to. For our basic plan, it was limited to 3 simultaneous tests and for the next higher plan, it was limited to 10 simultaneous tests. We have now decided to lift that restriction and allow all users to run as many tests they want (of course, the number of visitors they can test is still limited according to their plan). Even our 30 day free trial has unlimited simultaneous tests!

Hope you like these new announcements. We will be adding a lot of new features and enhancements, so if you have any specific request or need clarification, please feel free to email us at info@wingify.com

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I don’t usually talk about our company here on this blog but today’s post is an exception because we got nominated for not one, but two prestigious awards. The first one is Red Herring Asia 100, where they choose 100 companies from all over Asia who have potential to make it big. The other nomination is for NASSCOM Emerge 50 which choses 50 emerging companies from India in the IT field.

Red Herring is a widely recognized brand famous for spotting Microsoft during their infancy. On the other hand, NASSCOM is India’s top association of IT industry and is highly regarded for building India’s brand for IT services. I feel lucky to be nominated for these awards. The whole Wingify team (see below, yes we’re 8 people now) deserves to be recognized:

Please wish us luck for these awards. We have our fingers crossed!

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If you are a Visual Website Optimizer user, you will be excited to know about the latest feature we have released which we call as frequently used (conversion) goals. With this feature, while you are creating a new A/B, multivariate or split URL test, we recommend you conversion goals that you are most likely to add in this test. We do this recommendation based on analyzing your previously created tests and which goals you had added for those tests. As you create more tests, we get a better idea on which goals you use most frequently and recommend you the same (to save time). Here’s a screenshot of the new feature (note the section which says Frequently used goals):

Why use frequently used goals?

The name of new feature is bit of misnomer because we don’t actually list frequently used goals but we list the goals you are most likely to add. This is an intelligent recommendation that takes variety of parameters into consideration. We analyze how frequently, how recently and for which A/B tests you had added the goal. The major benefit of this feature is that for any new test that you create, you can easily reuse that goal at a click of a link. No need to type that goal again and no need to add or update any code on your website. This means that you can define standard website goals such as signup, search, revenue, funnel visits, etc. and then simply pick these goals from the list while creating the test.

Note: this feature also works with custom conversion goals which are used if your conversion goal triggers through JavaScript (e.g. if you have a form submitted through AJAX). Obviously, with custom conversion goals, you need to add a code snippet on your site depending on how you triggered the goal. Earlier, you had to update this code for every new test you created. But now, you can simply integrate the custom conversion code once, and then simply reuse it across different tests.

Other new features

We also released a couple of minor new features:

• Test thresholds: by default, we declare winning variation if the (statistical) confidence is >95% (here’s the math of A/B testing if you are interested). Now from settings, you can change it to any value you want. So if you want to be REALLY sure about results, we suggest increasing it to 99%. If you are happy-go-lucky type, you can even lower it to 80% (although we recommend against decreasing default value of threshold)
• Custom Currency (in reports): with revenue tracking feature, you can start tracking revenues in reports. By default, the currency shown was US Dollar symbol ($). Now you can customize it to show any other symbol.
• Google-bot exclusion: we have blogged in the past that there is no effect of A/B testing on SEO. This still holds true as Google and other search bots do not execute JavaScript hence do not see variations you are testing. But we believe that, in future, Google and other search engines may come up with a bot capable of executing JavaScript. Hence, just to be sure, we have now added a check in our JavaScript so that all search bots get excluded from the test.

Hope you like the updates! There are couple of other major features that we are currently baking. Our whole team is very excited to continuously improve Visual Website Optimizer. Please do let us know if you have a particular feature request.

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Two weeks back we launched a brand new interface for Visual Website Optimizer which, thankfully, was very well received by our customers. They love how simple we have made creating A/B and multivariate tests. They also love the redesigned, detailed (conversion rate, revenue and heatmap) reports. Today, we are proud to release an update to the new interface: a comprehensive test management interface!

New test management interface

Why do we need test management? Well, some of our customers do very large scale testing. They have hundreds of tests in their account with many that are currently live and running. The plethora of (A/B, split, multivariate or heatmap tests) made it somewhat difficult to make sense of the list of tests. So based on user feedback, we have come up with a new test management interface. Have a look at the screenshot:

So, what’s new?

There are number of new test management features but following are the major ones:

• Labels: this new feature allows you to create and add (arbitrary) labels to your tests thereby helping in grouping and filtering. For example, if you are running three different kinds of tests (on homepage, product pages and checkout page respectively), you can use labels to group and filter similar tests simply by clicking on that label. Of course, you can apply multiple labels to tests so in addition to label specifying category of tests, you could have one label for tests with winners and one label for tests that didn’t work out.
• Always-on-top test panel: this feature allows you to select multiple tests and start, stop, pause or delete all of them at once. This panel will also allow you to add labels to multiple tests simultaneously. A great feature about this panel is that it always remains on top of the page (even as you scroll).
• Search box: allows you to quickly search for the test by searching various attributes (test name, test URL, etc.)
• Filtering: you can filter tests by test state (running, paused, stopped or draft) and by test type (A/B, split, multivariate, etc.)

We hope you like the new features. As usual, if you have any feedback for us, we’re all ears!

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Today is a very proud day for us primarily due to two reasons: a) we are launching completely revamped interface of Visual Website Optimizer that is packed with loads of new features; b) we have achieved 10,000 total signups (trial + paid).

Awesome new interface

This new interface has been in development for about 3 months and it completely changes the look-and-feel of the application. Focus of the new interface has been to make creating and running A/B (or multivariate or split) tests even easier (and snappier). The new (tabbed) reports allows you to intuitively interpret test results. Know which variations are performing better and which ones are performing worse on goals such as revenue, conversion rate, visitor engagement, etc. Okay, enough of talking. Watch a short video of the new interface:

Awesome new features

It is not just the interface that has changed. We have added number of features alongside. Sample a few new features:

• Asynchronous code snippet (in beta): Our biggest innovation! This new code snippet ensures there is zero impact on your website load time while an A/B test is running. It also ensures that if our servers are inaccessible, your website loads normally (graceful degradation). The asynchronous code is in beta but we are very confident about it as early adopters reported success with it.
• Email reports, tracking code and variation previews to your colleagues
• Thumbnail previews of your variations
• Tabbed reports so you don’t have to do lot of scrolling in case of multiple conversion goals
• New test summary chart to instantly understand test performance
• Intuitive and snappier test creation process (AJAX powered)
• Report enhancements: print option, average order value, tabbed navigation of goals, etc.
• Powerful account management: add/edit permission based logins and sub-accounts
• Improved test filtering and searching

There are many other subtle improvements that we will leave to you to discover.

Screenshots of the new interface

Following screenshots will show you different aspects of Visual Website Optimizer‘s new interface.

Sample Report

Thumbnail Previews

Heatmap

Testing Options

Plugins / Integrations

Send report via email

Milestone: 10,000 signups

We begin our journey about a year ago (in May 2010) when we launched Visual Website Optimizer paid plans. Today we are psyched to announce that we have achieved a total of 10,000 signups (free trial + paid). Our customers include individual bloggers, small businesses and all the way to large enterprises such as Mircosoft, AMD, Groupon and FourSquare. Our revenue has been growing by 10-15% consistently for last one year and thanks to increased userbase our servers are now handling 2.2+ billion pageviews per month. We are proudly self-funded and are extremely profitable. Next phase is to expand the team and hence we are actively hiring engineers and sales guys. If you want to shake the website optimization world, join us!

Thank you, our users and customers

This new interface was driven entirely from user feedback and we thank all early adopters for helping us fix kinks before release (including but of course not limited to Janco Klijnstra from Traffic4U, Ahmad Rahman from AMD, Lucy Spencer from LoveFilm, Nate Ende from Trinity Insight and Karl Blanks from Conversion Rate Experts) . We are incredibly lucky to have them as customers as they take their precious time to help us improve Visual Website Optimizer.

Of course, we are far from done in our mission to make A/B testing fun, easy and profitable. We would love to hear your feedback on new interface and how we can further improve Visual Website Optimizer.

Signup for FREE 30 day trial

If you want to try out the new interface, simply signup for our no commitments free 30 day trial and let us know what you think!

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Ecommerce websites know how important is it to do regular A/B testing. And if you need to change your website code every time you create an A/B test, you are bound to get slow and very frustrated. We already have an integration with BigCommerce, one of the most popular online store SaaS. Now we have come up with a fantastic A/B testing extension for most popular open source eCommerce solution: Magento.

The A/B testing extension for Magento is dead simple to install and does not require you to fiddle with any of your template source code. Creating A/B test is as simple as installing the Magento plugin and then creating an A/B test in Visual Website Optimizer. That’s it! No more painful changes in website code to get a simple Add-to-cart button test done.

Installation instructions for Magento A/B testing extension

• Download the extension and extract it
• Move the folder “app” into your site’s root directory. Click “Yes” to overwrite files, if prompted
• Logout and login to Magento once
• In Admin Panel of your site, go to “Configurations” under “System” menu
• In left panel, watch out for the section titled “Wingify” and click “A/B testing using Visual Web Optimizer”
• On configurations page of the extension, activate it and enter your Visual Website Optimizer account ID (can be found after signing up and logging into your Visual Website Optimizer account)
• Create A/B tests using Visual Website Optimizer interface and make them live instantaneously (since the plugin is already installed and activated on your site)

Let us know if the extension is useful! Hope you get great results for A/B, split and multivariate tests on your eCommerce store.

Note: You will still need to add additional code for revenue goal and the custom conversion goal.

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Squeeze pages are special type of landing pages which try to collect email address of a visitor by promising a free offer. Squeeze pages usually have high conversion rate (typically >10%) since the offer is compelling and call to action is clear. Here’s how a typical squeeze page looks like:

Squeeze page example

Note the provocative headline, prominent call to action and a form to collect email address. That’s all this page has but it works wonderfully!

Split testing on Squeeze Page Templates

Rishan (from 4D Innovations) is one the Visual Website Optimizer customers and he runs a business that empowers and guides people to achieve financial freedom by doing what they love in the context of the online marketplace. He decided to do a split test between three squeeze pages (with same offer but different content) and amazingly he found a version that converted at an impressive 28%. That means for 100 visitors, he was able to persuade 28 visitors to give their email address to them in exchange of free guide. This conversion rate was an improvement of 125% of his original page (which had 12% conversion rate).

Just by changing the design of the squeeze page, Rishan more than doubled his conversion rate. No new offers, same traffic but now 125% more email addresses collected for the list. How cool is that?

Best Squeeze Page Design

So, till now I have just talked about the split test. But where is the screenshot of the highest converting squeeze page?

Well, following are different versions tested in the split test and their corresponding conversion rates:

Original page: 12.5% conversion rate

Variation B: 21% conversion rate

Best performing design (Variation A): 28% conversion rate

Variation A converted at 28% and improved conversions by 125% over the original version (the difference was statistically significant).

Interesting point to note is that Rishan never expected variations to perform better as control had the opt-in form above the fold and winning variation didn’t. That’s why he said: “There’s no way to find out which design converts best unless you do an A/B test!”

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