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 .
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)?
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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!
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):
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.
We also released a couple of minor new features:
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.
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!
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:
There are number of new test management features but following are the major ones:
We hope you like the new features. As usual, if you have any feedback for us, we’re all ears!
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).
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:
It is not just the interface that has changed. We have added number of features alongside. Sample a few new features:
There are many other subtle improvements that we will leave to you to discover.
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
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!
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.
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!
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.
Let us know if the extension is useful! Hope you get great results for A/B, split and multivariate tests on your eCommerce store.
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!
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?
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!”
Visual Website Optimizer is expanding its team! I am so proud of the progress we made in last 10 months (we launched paid plans in May 2010): growing from 0 to 7000+ users we have today. We are entirely self-funded (have not raised any angel or VC round) and have been profitable from day 1. Thank you, our lovely customers.
Touch wood, things have gone well for us and I hope they will continue to be good. That’s why we have now decided to move to a new office and grow the team by hiring the best programmers, support engineers and sales guys we can find in Delhi, India. (Already extended offers to 2 more kickass engineers.)
Our new office is on 7th floor of a multi-storied building and has a view that is unmatched with any other office place we have seen. We simply fell in love with it when we were looking for a new place. See some of our pics below:
That’s me (Paras Chopra) and my new workspace!
Our team (from left to right): Sushaantu, Sparsh and me (Paras)
Another beautiful view (Sushaantu in the foreground, Sparsh is the cameraman!)
We recently put up a careers page and are looking forward to hiring people for three profiles below:
We prefer candidates who are willing to work from our office in Delhi, India (we prefer having team at one physical location though for customer happiness and technical support, we are willing to work with remote candidates). So if you are interested in joining a bootstrapped, fast growing and profitable startup or know someone who could be interested, please do let us know at careers@wingify.com.
We’re hungry to grow more and more!
We already have powerful behavioral targeting and segmentation options in Visual Website Optimizer. Today, we’re proud to announce a brand new feature that will take your website to the next level. We just released a feature that is Holy Grail of targeting and personalization: knowing what a visitor is thinking while browsing your website (and then displaying relevant content to him/her to boost conversion rate and sales).
Yes, yes, yes, we are as excited about this new feature as you are. Once you install Visual Website Optimizer on your website, the mind reading feature uses subtle differences in how a visitor is moving his/her mouse to gauge what s/he is thinking right now. Essentially, you get a report on following four attributes (note that this is an initial list, it will expand as our research progresses):
We’re an A/B testing company and to prove this new feature works, we conducted an A/B test. Our hypothesis was that by changing a webpage we can affect visitor mood and if Visual Website Optimizer’s new feature detects that change, it definitely works. We did this test on our homepage. Here’s original homepage:
- Original Homepage – 
In variation, we tried replacing text with an image that was definitely going to affect visitor’s mood in some way. Here’s the variation:
- Variation of Homepage – 
We did this test for a little over a week and here are the results:
As expected, happiness and fun factor increased tremendously when visitors saw that poor boy’s image on our homepage. Moreover, people started subconsciously associating rain drops in the picture with likelihood that it is going to rain today.
Most surprisingly, there was a sharp drop in trust and total signup rate because of that poor boy on our homepage (Glad we have stopped the test. It affected us financially!) Why did that drop happen? We cannot tell! There are always somethings that remain a mystery after an A/B test is completed.
In a word: mathematics! We use various inputs to determine what a visitor is thinking. The most significant input is visitor mouse movements. The way people move their mouse tells a lot about what they are thinking. Strange but true!
Details of implementation only for nerds and geeks: we used artificial neural networks to train a predictive model whose input is vector comprising of mouse movements in past 30 seconds and whose outputs are various factors like happiness, raininess, etc. The data for training this model came from 6 month long research where we recruited a team of 10 normal people from 4Chan.org and asked them to visit various websites and tell us what they were thinking while they were browsing. Without their knowledge we recorded mouse movements and then simply used our expertise in machine learning to map mouse movements to behavior! Genius, isn’t it?
According to our knowledge, no other company in the world provides such amazing technology. So, why don’t you signup for a free 30 day trial of Visual Website Optimizer and try the new feature without any obligations? We can assure you that you are going to have a lot of fun spooking your visitors
