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..

7 Comments »

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

3 Comments »

Most of the times you create and run A/B tests on all your website visitors. But there may be cases when you would like to test your ideas only for a particular segment for visitors. For example, you may want to test if a stripped down layout of website works better for returning visitors. Or you may want to test if a Twitter-specific banner gets more clicks from visitors arriving from Twitter.

New feature: Segmentation

We are proud to announce that we have launched Segmentation feature in Visual Website Optimizer. Using this feature you can choose to run the test only for the visitors who qualify your segmentation conditions. Have a look at the following screenshot:

You can choose and combine any of the following conditions available for segmentation:

• Current URL
• Referring URL
• Visitor Type: New or Returning
• Search Keywords
• Cookie Value
• Referral Type: Direct, Organic or Referrer
• Query parameter in URL (e.g. campaign_id, page_id, etc.)

Through the seven conditions above, we have covered most of the segmentation scenarios. Is there any other condition that you think could be useful for segmentation?

Behavioral Targeting and Personalization Possibilities

This is the most interesting part of segmentation. Thanks to flexibility of running multiple tests on the same page, you can personalize landing pages according to visitor segment. For example, if you have a generic landing page for all your marketing campaigns, using segmentation you can show campaign specific headlines and images to different types of visitors. In other words, thanks to segmentation feature, you can target your visitors with segment specific landing page and test it against control if it really drives up conversions. (You can also do neat stuff like inserting search keywords into variation or personalizing page according to city or country. See Advanced code mode for details).

We are *VERY* excited about segmentation feature as it allows power users to run targeted tests and personalize experience for visitors using a super-easy WYSIWYG editor. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please leave a comment below.

Do you like the segmentation feature? Would you actually see a use-case for it on your site?

14 Comments »