Visual Website Optimizer

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 with an awesome view

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!)

Want to join our team?

We recently put up a careers page and are looking forward to hiring people for three profiles below:

• Software Engineering
• Customer Happiness and Technical Support
• Sales and Business Development

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!

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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):

• Happiness Factor: What % of visitors are feeling happy, lousy or simply pathetic and if your site design is doing a good job lifting that mood (our research indicated that 92% of websites were so hilariously designed that visitors were indeed amused)
• Fun Factor: What % of visitors are in no mood to do any serious work (we have a feature whereby you can popup flash games to such visitors – we believe this kind of targeting increases conversion rate)
• Raininess Factor: What % of visitors think it is going to rain today (for websites that sell umbrellas this factor is a serious indicator of a sale. This attribute was hard to model but we considered it so important that we spent 85% of our budget on making sure it works flawlessly)
• Trust Factor: What % of visitors think you will take their money, close your shop and run away (ironically mistrust increases if you provide a phone number on your site)

Proof that this feature works

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.

How does this feature work?

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?

Try out the (literally) mind blowing feature

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

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We are extremely proud to release a brand new feature in Visual Website Optimizer: Revenue Tracking. This is a significant new development for our product because it means now in addition to tracking conversion rate (for multiple goals such as clicks on links, visit to pages, form submissions, engagement, etc.), you can track various revenue metrics as well (including revenue per visitor, total revenue, average order value, etc.)

Why you should track revenue in your split tests?

Revenue tracking for A/B split tests is utmost important when a monetary transaction is involved (either immediately or at the end of conversion funnel) and a conversion goal may have different monetary values. In some cases, higher conversion rate may translate into lower revenue, so basing all decisions merely on conversion rate can lead you to choosing a variation that actually decreases your revenue.

Let’s imagine that a software / eCommerce company is running a split test on pricing page where (in a variation) lowest plan of $2o has been removed. For example, imagine running a test such as below:

If you just measure conversion rate, you can expect to see following results (lower conversion rate for variation since we removed smallest plan in it):

• Control (original page): 1.2%
• Variation (smallest plan removed): 0.8%

However, if you start measuring revenue for this split test, you can see that variation actually resulted in higher revenue per visitor:

• Control (original page): 28 cents per visitor revenue and $1400 total revenue
• Variation (smallest plan removed): 36 cents per visitor revenue and $1800 total revenue

Naturally, you would want to choose a variation which results in higher per visitor revenue even if total number of conversions and conversion rate decreases. That’s why revenue tracking is so important for A/B, split and multivariate tests. It lets you measure impact of your test variations on a metric that drives your business: revenue.

How to do Revenue Tracking in Visual Website Optimizer

We believe revenue tracking shouldn’t be hard and that’s why we have tried to make it dead-simple to implement it in Visual Website Optimizer. All you need to do is this:

• Create A/B, split or multivariate test
• On goals page, select ‘Revenue Tracking’ as goal and enter the URL of the goal as the page where you will have access to visitor’s revenue number (it is typically available on thank you page after a successful payment / transaction)
• On that thank you page, you simply need to copy-paste default VWO code and output a JavaScript variable _vis_opt_revenue with value equal to total revenue generated by the visitor. For example, if the visitor purchased 2 items (one $15 and the other $7), simply output $22 in the variable. If visitor only bought one item (say $10), output $10 only. That’s it. You don’t have to be concerned about which variation visitor saw or what individual items did the visitor bought. You just need to output total revenue and Visual Website Optimizer will take care of the rest.

For example, if the page where we redirect after successful plan purchase is http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/thank-you.php then all we need to do is to copy-paste default VWO code there and also output following code:

<script>
    var _vis_opt_revenue=49;
</script>

Of course, the value of revenue (49 in this case) will change dynamically depending on actual revenue generated by the visitor. If you already have revenue tracking setup with your web analytics tool (such as Google Analytics), extending it for Visual Website Optimizer should be a piece of cake. If not, just ask your IT guy, he would know where and how to output revenue for tracking. All in all, implementing revenue tracking in Visual Website Optimizer is quite simple.

How do Revenue Tracking reports look like?

Once revenue tracking is in place, you will see extensive reports like following:

As you can see, reports show you various metrics for different variations:

• Revenue per visitor (the basic metric that determines performance of variation)
• Total revenue
• Total number of conversions (you can calculate average order value as Total Revenue / Total conversions)

Hope you like this new feature! Let us know if you need any help or assistance with revenue tracking in Visual Website Optimizer.

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This is the 2nd article in the series of interviews and guest posts we are doing on this blog regarding A/B testing and conversion rate optimization. In 1st article, we interviewed Oli from Unbounce on Landing Pages Best Practices.

Editor’s note: this guest post is written by Noah Kagan, founder of web app deals website Appsumo. I have known Noah for quite some time and he is the goto person for any kind of marketing or product management challenges. You can follow him on Twitter @noahkagan. In the article below Noah shares some of the A/B testing secrets and realities that he discovered after doing hundreds of tests on Appsumo.

Only 1 out of 8 A/B tests have driven significant change

AppSumo.com reaches around 5,000 visitors a day. A/B testing has given us some dramatic gains such as increasing our email conversion over 5x and doubling our purchase conversion rate.

However, I wanted to share some harsh reality about our testing experiences. I hope sharing this helps encourage you not to give up with testing and get the most out of it. Here’s a data point that will most likely surprise you:

Only 1 out of 8 A/B tests have driven significant change.

That’s preposterous. Not just a great vocab word but a harsh reality. Here are a few tests from us that I was SURE would produce amazing results only to disappoint us later.

A/B test #FAIL 1

Hypothesis: Title testing. We get a lot of traffic to our landing page and having a more clear message will significantly increase conversions.

Result: Not-conclusive. We’ve tried over 8 versions and so far not one has produced any significant improvement.

Why it failed: People don’t read. (Note: the real answer here is “i dont know why it didn’t work out, thats why im doing AB testing”)

Suggestion: We need more drastic changes to our page like showing more info about our deals or pictures to encourage a better conversion rate.

A/B test #FAIL 2

Hypothesis: Having a tweet for a discount pop-up in a light-box vs someone having to click a button to tweet. Assumed reducing a click and putting it (annoyingly) in front of someones face will encourage more tweets.

Result: 10% decrease with light-box version.

Why it failed: ANNOYING. Totally agree. Also, it was premature as people had no idea about it nor were interested in tweeting at that moment.

Suggestion: Better integrate peoples desire to share into our site design.

A/B test #FAIL 3

Hypothesis: A discount would encourage more people to give us their email on our landing page.

Result: Fail. Decreased conversion to email on our landing page.

Why it failed: An email is a precious resource and we are dealing with sophisticated users. Unless you are familiar with our brand which is a small audience then you aren’t super excited to trade your email for % off.

Suggestion: Give away $ instead of % off. Also, offer the % off with examples of deals so they can see what they could use it for.

Thoughts on failed A/B tests

All of these were a huge surprise and a disappointment for me.

How many times have you said, “this experience is 100x better, I can’t wait to see how much it beats the original version?”

A few days later you check your testing dashboard to see it actually LOSING.

Word of caution. Be aware of premature e-finalization. Don’t end tests before data is finalized (aka statistically significant).

I learned the majority of my testing philosophy at SpeedDate where literally every changed is tested and measured. SO MANY times my tests initially blew the original version away only to find out a few days later that a) the improvement wasn’t as amazing after all or b) it actually lost.

How can you get the most out of your tests?

Some A/B testing tips based on my experience:

• Weekly iterations. This is the most effective way I’ve found to do A/B testing.
  • Pick only 1 thing you want to improve. Let’s say it’s conversion rate to buying on first time visitor.
  • Get a benchmark of what that conversion rate is
  • Do 1-3 tests per week to increase that
  • Do it every week until you hit some internal goal you’ve set for yourself

  Most people test 80 different things instead of 1 priority over and over. It simplifies your life.

• Patience. Realize to get results it may take a few thousand visits or 2 weeks. Pick bigger changes to test so you aren’t waiting around for small improvements.
• Persistence. Knowing that 7 out of 8 of your tests will produce insignificant improvements should comfort you that you aren’t doing it wrong. That’s just how it is. How badly do you want those improvements? Stick with it.
• Focus on the big. I say this way too much but you still won’t listen. Some will and they’ll see big results from this. If you have to wait 3-14 days for your a/b tests to finish then you’d rather have dramatic changes like -50% or 200% than a 1-2% change. This may depend on where you are in your business but likely you aren’t Amazon so 1% improvements won’t make you a few million dollars more.

If you like this article follow @appsumo for more details and check out Appsumo.com for fun deals.

Editor’s note: Hope you liked the guest post. It is true that many A/B tests produce insignificant results and that’s precisely the reason that you should be doing A/B testing all the time. For next articles in this series, if you know someone whom I can interview or want to contribute a guest post yourself, please get in touch with me (paras@wingify.com).

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Note: this webinar has already happened. Here’s a recording.

Here’s your golden chance to get $1495 worth of analysis on your landing page which isn’t converting as well as it should. Visual Website Optimizer has teamed up with Conversion Voodoo and GazeHawk to present you a free landing page analysis workshop.

What? a live webinar where three (randomly chosen) landing pages will be analyzed by professionals

When? 9 AM PST (12 PM EST | 5 PM GMT). Thursday, 10th February 2011.

How to Register? click here to register for free

Details of the free webinar

You are requested to register and submit a landing page / web page URL which you want to be analyzed. From submitted entries, we will pick 3 landing pages and the team at Conversion Voodoo will do an extensive analysis (worth $1000) to tell you what exactly can be fixed on that landing page for higher conversions and sales. See an example analysis by Conversion Voodoo below just to get an idea of what sort of analysis you could get for your own landing page:

Impressed? Wait, there are more freebies!

GazeHawk has pitched in to provide heatmaps (worth $495) for all 3 landing pages which, based on actual eye tracking on your landing page, will show you what your visitors see on it and what they ignore. Here is how an example heatmap looks like:

All in all, you will see your own landing page analyzed and dissected by professionals in an entirely new way.

Duration of webinar

The 30 minute webinar on landing pages comprises of:

a) 15 minute session where Conversion Voodo will analyze 3 randomly chosen landing pages for free and GazeHawk will provide free heatmaps for those landing pages;

b) 15 minute session on how to use Visual Website Optimizer for creating A/B tests on one of the chosen landing pages.

Register Now for free landing page analysis!

Seats are limited so don’t miss the webinar! Attend the webinar to know if your landing page has been selected for analysis. Even if your landing page is not chosen, the webinar promises you to provide tons of insights on how to improve sales and conversions which you can apply immediately.

NOTE: A recording of the webinar will be sent after the event.

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We recently rolled out new updates on Visual Website Optimizer which has made A/B testing easier than ever. In fact, we have made it so easy that you will be able to create A/B tests with your eyes closed. Don’t believe us? Watch the video below:

OK, so the claim of being able to create A/B tests with eyes closed was bit of an exaggeration but you can see just how incredibly easy we have made the whole processes of designing and creating A/B tests. Amongst numerous updates we rolled out, following are salient ones:

• Resizing images, buttons, text blocks, etc.
• Moving (or re-locating) text, button, headline, forms or just about anything on the webpage
• Hiding or removing sections on webpage
• Clubbing multiple changes on a page as one variation

These updates now allow you to change your original landing page or webpage in a variety of ways (moving, resizing, editing, hiding, etc.) to create totally different variations. Isn’t that cool?

Additionally, we introduced some new kinds of tests that you can see below:

As you can see above, now you can create 5 different kinds of tests in Visual Website Optimizer:

• A/B Test: club various changes on the page in one variation
• Multivariate Testing: every change is combined with every other change on the page and VWO automatically creates page variations from the combinations
• Split URL Testing: you host variation pages on your servers, VWO splits traffic amongst them
• Heatmap / Clickmap: visually see where visitors are clicking on your landing page or web page
• Measure Conversion Rate: measure conversion rate on multiple goals your website or landing page

Phew! Aren’t they lot of updates? If you are VWO user, we would love to get feedback on these new features. If you are not, we encourage you to Signup for Free Trial Account (no credit card needed) and start doing A/B testing on your website in less than 5 minutes.

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Yay! It is holiday time again. We all have some exciting, fun-filled weeks ahead. Santa Claus, Snow, Lights, Trees, Decorations, oh we absolutely love this time of the year. The whole team at Visual Website Optimizer wishes you Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2011. May you have best of the times with your friends and family.

We wanted to celebrate this occasion with a teeny-tiny gift for you:

• For paid customers: Extra 25% visitors in your account to test (for current billing cycle).
• For users whose trial account had expired: Re-activation of 30 day trial with FREE 2500 visitors to test.
• For existing trial account users: Extra 2500 visitors and extension of trial by 30 days
• For new trial account users: Extra 2500 visitors (instead of usual 1000). Signup for free now!

For availing this gift, all you need to do is to login to your Visual Website Optimizer account before 7th January 2011. That’s it. No gimmicks, no fluff. Just a honest gift from our side

We hope you enjoy the holidays and have a prosperous 2011.

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One of the Visual Website Optimizer users, Jason Thompson did a great job in integrating VWO with Omniture SiteCatalyst. (We already have a Google Analytics plugin).

We recently updated the plugin for Site Catalyst and decided to write the instructions on our own blog (though the original credit for the code goes to Jason).

How to integrate Visual Website Optimizer and SiteCatalyst

You need to designate one of your Custom Conversion variables as your optimization tracking variable and copy-paste following code in doPlugins section of your s_code.js file. (Also make sure VWO code snippet is located before s_code.js on your page)

try { if(typeof(_vis_opt_settings_loaded) == "boolean"){

var _combination = _vis_opt_readCookie('_vis_opt_exp_'+_vis_opt_experiment_id+'_combi');  
if(typeof(_vis_opt_comb_name[_combination]) != "undefined"){
s.eVar55= _vis_opt_experiment_id + ':' + _vis_opt_comb_name[_combination];  }

} } catch(err) { }

That’s all is what is required to start importing Visual Website Optimizer variation data into your Omniture SiteCatalyst.

How do the reports in SiteCatalyst look like?

Following is a sample report (fictitious data):

That’s it. I hope you get a wealth of additional data from our SiteCatalyst plugin.

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We are proud to announce a Certified Partner program for agencies / consultants who have been using Visual Website Optimizer to optimize their clients’ conversion rate and sales. We have a host of benefits for the agencies that are accepted into the program:

• Official ‘Visual Website Optimizer Certified Partner’ designation and logo
• Recommendation of your testing and conversion rate optimization services to Visual Website Optimizer customers (you will get more leads!)
• Priority technical support
• Listing on our Certified Partners page
• Invitation to exclusive online training events and upcoming beta features
• Opportunity to write guest posts on Visual Website Optimizer blog (with links to your website)

In a nutshell, if you are accepted into this program, you will enter into an exclusive club with a world of benefits. Best of all: there is no cost for applying to partner program. However, the space is limited (initially, we are planning to accept only 30 agencies into the program) and you must meet certain eligibility requirements:

• Designed and executed at least 3 tests for your clients or customers
• Visual Website Optimizer customer for at least 2 months
• Commitment to provide a notice period of at least 3 months before stopping to use Visual Website Optimizer
• Proof of conversion rate optimization and testing services you provide (please provide link to your case studies or client list)
• If accepted into program, commitment to display ‘Visual Website Optimizer Certified Partner’ logo on your website (preferred with a link to our homepage)

How to apply?

Simply email us at partners@wingify.com with your Visual Website Optimizer account username and any other information needed to satisfy eligibility requirement. We will notify you within one week if you are accepted into the program.

NOTE: Initially, we are planning to accept only first 30 eligible agencies. So, if you plan to become a Visual Website Optimizer certified partner, you must apply soon.

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UsabilityWeb.nl is a Dutch blog/magazine on the topics of usability, user experience and human-centered design. It’s an initiative by Concept7, which is one of our agency customers. During last few months, they had been running couple of split tests on the magazine site using Visual Website Optimizer. As you will read, they increased the conversion rate by as much as 80% simply by testing a different phrase. This result is similar to our previous A/B testing case studies where a small change indeed resulted in a significant improvement in conversions. We are proud to share a joint-case study on UsabilityWeb.nl A/B testing below:

You can also download the A/B testing case study in PDF format. Please feel free to share, tweet, embed the presentation to spread the word about potential of A/B testing for improving conversions.

If you want to read the transcript for the presentation, here it is:

• A/B Testing on UsabilityWeb.nl Using Visual Website Optimizer Rick Venema [email_address] +31(0)50-3600233 Paras Chopra [email_address] +91-98682-21372 www.usabilityweb.nl
• First Test Traffic to “Huur mij in” (“Hire me”) page
• The button is called “Huur mij in” (“Hire me”) which might scare people away because they probably don’t want to do that right away or first want to now something about Stefan which is also on that page. A Statistics (Sept. 2010) Visits 5712 Clickthrough rate 2.8%
• Hypothesis : By changing the label to “Over mij” (“About me”) people will be more inclined to click on the link to view more information about Stefan. B Statistics (Sept/ 2010) Visits 5096 Clickthrough rate 5.1%
• “ About Me ” had 80% higher clickthrough rate as compared to the text “ Hire Me ” First Test – Results and Conclusions Conclusion : by decreasing the weight of the label and making it more personal, visitors will more likely click on the link.
• Second Test Traffic to “Magazine” page
• The label “Ik meld me aan voor het magazine” (“ I want to subscribe to the magazine ”) sounds like you get yourself into a paid subscription if the visitor doesn’t notice the free banner (alongside, as a red button). A Statistics (Sept. 2010) Visits 1000 Clickthrough rate 6.7%
• Hypothesis : By changing the label to “Gratis aanmelden” (“Free subscription”) the visitor is more likely be encouraged to click on the link. B Statistics (Sept. 2010) Visits 1040 Clickthrough rate 9.8%
• “ Free Subscription ” had 46% higher clickthrough rate as compared to the text “ I want to subscribe the magazine ” Second Test – Results and Conclusions Conclusion : by highlight the “ free ” aspect of the offer, a visitor doesn’t need to think a lot before clicking on the offer.
• About Visual Website Optimizer
  • World’s easiest A/B and Multivariate testing tool
  • Made for marketers; no technical experience needed
  • Only insert code once in the website; and then create unlimited number of tests from the interface
  • Integrated Heatmap and Clickmap reports
  • visualwebiteoptimizer.com
• About Concept7
  • We are a team of passionate designers, that help companies grow their online business. We believe in the power of Human Centered Design. Therefore, we design websites, inspired by the people who’ll use them. 
  • www.concept7.nl

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