and so should you...
We are proud to announce the integration of Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) with Unbounce, which is an awesome landing page creation tool. If you are a VWO user and want to create a new landing page, you now know the tool we’d recommend.
The integration of the two tools is dead-simple and Unbounce has put together a post announcing why they recommend Visual Website Optimizer for multivariate testing.
Benefits of Integration
The main benefit, of course, is that using Unbounce you can effortlessly create new landing pages. So, if you want to start a new PPC campaign, for example, you won’t have to wait for your IT team to help you with that. Simply fire up Unbounce, create a new landing page, integrate it with Visual Website Optimizer and start optimizing it.
The main benefits of using Visual Website Optimizer with Unbounce is that you would be able to do the following for your landing pages created in Unbounce:
Read more about Visual Website Optimizer + Unbounce and watch an instructional video.
We just launched a cool new feature in Visual Website Optimizer: email notifications! VWO already has a feature which monitors your test in the background and disables loser variations or starts displaying winning variation to all site traffic automatically. This ensured that the test reduced risk of losing sales and conversions because losing variations get automatically disabled. Now, we have added email notifications to automatic monitoring so that any time a winner or loser variation is found, you get an email like the following:
UWe also did a quick update in conversion goals, so that you can now choose any goal as primary goal (which will be analyzed for crunching email notifications). So, now you can pick the conversion goal (note: you can add multiple conversion goals for each A/B test) you want to monitor, choose to disable losing variations for that goal and simply sit back and relax. You will get updates as soon as losing or winner variations are found!
It has been criticized, but it is always guaranteed to work. What is that we are talking about? Yes, you guessed it right: red buttons! No matter how many people consider such A/B tests as a trivial exercise, every now and then they have been demonstrated to increase conversions.
The theory of red buttons also worked for one of the Visual Website Optimizer’s users, although they use orange, which fits their color scheme, instead. GSM.nl is one of the Netherlands’ largest eCommerce shops selling mobile phones, GSM plans and other mobile accessories. As you can imagine for an eCommerce site, they have Buy Now buttons used all over the website: product pages, catalogue pages, special offers pages, etc. The challenge for this particular A/B test was that they had to vary ALL buttons on the site at once. A lot of pages (such as the homepage) contain multiple instances of the order button, one for each featured product. This seemed complicated, but with Visual Website Optimizer they designed it in a matter of minutes.
All they did was created an alternative CSS stylesheet, and run the A/B test on the different stylesheets. The stylesheet defined how Buy Now buttons looked like, so if they do a split test of stylesheet they will automatically split test ALL the buttons on the website. Clever!
Here are different variations that were tested:
| With text buttons | With green buttons | With red buttons |
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The test results showed that the red (well, technically orange) buttons increased overall website engagement by 5% (statistically significant). Engagement is defined as click on any link on the page, so an increase in engagement means a reduction in bounce rate. Sales were also measured as one of the goals, which showed an increase too, but due to the relatively short test period, did not yet prove statistically significant)
As a follow up, of course, this test will be run long enough to determine if button color has any effect on actual sales. We are guessing that it makes a small contribution to increased sales, as more people use the site actively, but taken into account that a decision to purchase a product involves numerous variables such as product cost, shipping costs, discounts, etc, it is hard to measure if the change in color is the determining factor.
The case suggests it is safe to say to that a bright button color works well for catching attention and reducing bounce rate, and might even help actual sales. No matter how strong your gut feelings are, ultimately data tells the truth.
In the case of GSM.nl, it proved Visual Website Optimizer could easily test difficult questions, and provide answers in a matter of days.
A customer requested this feature, and we obliged! Visual Website Optimizer reports now come with a date picker to let a user see reports only for a specific date range (of course, in addition to the default aggregated report). See below how this date picker looks like:
Although test reports should always be analyzed in aggregate (to avoid introducing any statistical bias), this feature will come handy if you want to analyze following scenarios:
We are excited about this new feature, and it goes on to show that we are working towards making reports powerful and flexible to allow different kinds of analysis. Hope you too like the new feature!
Note: the date range doesn’t apply to clickmap and heatmap data. They are always shown in aggregate.
We’re excited, very excited. Today we launched a new feature that allows Visual Website Optimizer users to track goal A/B test conversions across multiple different domains and sub-domains without doing any extra settings. Due to restrictions posed by the way cookies work, earlier if multiple domains were involved we instructed users to take a hackish approach to track conversions. But now, it just works out-of-the-box. No extra setting, no code fiddling. Finally, cross-domain tracking is a reality.
Why is this significant?
A lot of internet marketers like to track a visitor across different domains. This isn’t for any malignant purpose, but simply because their services involve multiple domains. Consider following scenarios (all of which our users have come across):
While earlier doing such A/B tests was a painful job because cookies on one domain cannot be accessed from another domain, now (using Visual Website Optimizer) it is as simple as it can get. If you create an A/B or multivariate test which has multiple domains, simply select an option (during test creation) which tells VWO to use third-party cookies for tracking visitors and conversions. After that, your test will work as expected (without doing any other changes) even when multiple different domains are involved!
What are third party cookies and how do they work?
Now here is the interesting part: how do we make cross-domain conversion work? The answer is third party cookies. See the following image to understand how it works:
If you enable third-party cookies option in your test, in addition to storing visitor data (variation shown and conversion goals triggered) in cookies belonging to your domain, Visual Website Optimizer will send that data to our servers too. Once the data has been sent, our servers set cookies for the domain dev.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com. If your test involves another domain, next time your page requests test data, our servers send back visitor data too (because we can access visitor cookies set by our servers). In a way, our servers act as proxy between your multiple different domains and hence conversions can be tracked. Third-party cookies don’t tend to work smoothly on IE, Safari and Opera. However, after crazy amount of research and testing, we made it to work on all major browsers. So, this new method of cross-domain tracking should be fairly accurate.
Note that third-party cookie tracking is disabled by default. You need to enable by selecting an option during test creation process.
Feedback?
We believe that cross-domain tracking is an important milestone in the evolution of Visual Website Optimizer. To best of our knowledge, no other A/B or multivariate testing tool provides this functionality out of the box. So, if you happen to do a test which uses this new feature, please let us know your feedback on effectiveness and accuracy.
We recently revamped the introductory video for Visual Website Optimizer by adding a voice-over and updating it by including some new features (e.g. heatmaps).
From start (entering the test page URL) to end (interpreting test results), all it takes to run your first A/B test is just 2 minutes. And you thought testing is a dark art? 
Watch the video below:
Do you think video can be improved? Please leave a comment to let us know what can we add, remove or change to make A/B testing using Visual Website Optimizer even more exciting.
We had launched clickmaps and heatmaps for A/B tests recently in Visual Website Optimizer. Since then it has become the most popular feature amongst our users. We aren’t surprised by the success of this new feature because it gives a new angle to A/B test results. While you can always get information about conversion rate, bounce rate and other hard metrics from standard reports, visualizing “hotspots” on a page has a charm of its own.
Based on feedback from a user, we rolled out a new minor feature: consolidated clickmaps. Unlike traditional clickmaps, which show results only for a particular page, this new feature will aggregate click activity on ALL your website pages to show which parts get most clicks. This is useful if you have a website that has common template/theme across different pages (e.g. header, footer, sidebar, product box, etc.). Using consolidated clickmaps, you will be able to see statistics for elements common to your website.
This feature came handy when I analyzed visitor activity on my personal blog. All I had to do was to enter a URL pattern (http://www.paraschopra.com/blog*) which instructed VWO to generate a consolidated heatmap for all blog posts (technical detail: VWO combined heatmap data for all pages matching the URL pattern; * matches anything and that’s why the entered URL pattern matched all blog posts).
Here is the consolidated heatmap for all my blog posts:
Contrast this with a heatmap only for a single post:
As you can see, the consolidated heatmap has much more information than a single blog post heatmap. That is the real utility; you get to observe patterns of visitor behavior across your website which you may have otherwise missed or would require you browsing through tens of different heatmaps and then stitching patterns in your head.
Using this feature, you also get to see consolidated clickmaps. Here is a screenshot:
The consolidated clickmap clearly shows that 10% of all clicks on the page occur on Visual Website Optimizer banner on my blog. Some more statistics from the clickmap:
The stats are bit on the lower side but if you observe consolidated heatmap, you will see a lot of click activity on post text. This means that even though visitors aren’t clicking on links, they are still interacting with the post and reading it!
I hope you like the new feature! If you’d like to give it a spin simply login to your account (it is enabled by default for all accounts). Or, if you aren’t an existing user, signup for a 30 day (no-obligations) free trial here.
PS: Technical details. If you are wondering how we are able to generate consolidated heatmap, here is the trick: we don’t store absolute X and Y positions of visitor clicks. Rather we store xpath of the element being clicked. Common elements on the website have same xpath across different pages, hence we are easily able to aggregate that data.
Do you know where visitors are clicking on your website homepage? Do you know which parts of your website are hotspots that attract visitor attention? You can, of course, fire up your web analytics tool and tell me that 20% visitors go to sign up page after visiting homepage but that information doesn’t tell you the whole story.
First, some stats about Visual Website Optimizer homepage: 30% of visitors who come to homepage visit the sign up page too. Of course, this figure is unsurprising because we have a giant Sign up for FREE 30 day trial button right in the middle. So, a lot of visitors must be clicking on it to arrive on the sign up page?
That is what we believed all the while. In Visual Website Optimizer, we had recently released an experimental feature called clickmaps & heatmaps. Clickmaps provide complete click statistics on the web pages for different test variations. Heatmaps help in visualizing hotspots on your webpages where most clicks happen.
Continuing with the story of our homepage, here is a screenshot of heatmap of our homepage:
Can you see the hotspot over tiny Pricing link in the top navigation bar? To know exact statistics, we turn to clickmap of the homepage:
We were completely thrown off our chairs when we realized that 25% of the clicks on the page happen on that tiny link, while the giant Sign up for FREE Trial only gets 5% of the clicks. Moral of the story: the button isn’t playing as important role as we imagined. So, what we now replaced the Sign up button on homepage with Watch a short video button because any way visitors interested in signing up are clicking on Pricing link.
A/B testing and Clickmaps combined
The power of clickmaps & heatmaps increases ten-fold when you combine it with A/B testing. For example, if we replace Pricing link with Free Trial – will it generate a similar distribution of clicks? What if we replace navigation bar from left to the right? What if we change the text of the big button from Sign up for Free Trial to Plans & Pricing? All these are interesting scenarios and we plan to test them one by one.
Recently we completed an A/B test where we tested homepage against a simple page with a text box allowing visitor to do a live demo of the tool on his/her website. While the test results weren’t conclusive, the heatmap provided interesting insights:
The clicks were evenly distributed on different links and elements. Another surprising statistic was that in this variation about 10% clicks happened on Home link in the navigation bar as compared to 2% in our default homepage. This shows that because of the text box a lot of visitors thought that they weren’t on the homepage and tried to go to a page which provides more information.
The qualitative results produced by clickmaps and heatmaps complement quantitative A/B test results such as the one in screenshot below (not related to our homepage test):
The combination of A/B test and clickmaps is a lethal one! Being able to visualize click activity for your different variations gives you tons of ideas and insights beyond what can be captured in hard statistics.
Login to your Visual Website Optimizer account or sign up for a free 30 day trial to let us know if you find the new feature useful. Eagerly waiting for your comments! 
PS: You can, of course, produce clickmaps and heatmaps for your website without needing to create an A/B test.
Visual Website Optimizer API was privately announced to select users long time back but today we are happy to announce it to general public too. The API lets you pull complete test results into your internal dashboards. Results are returned for all test goals and include confidence levels, hits and conversions. amongst other metrics. The API also allows you to start and pause tests programmatically.
API interface is JSON and is currently available only by request. If you wish to use the API, email us at info@wingify.com and we will provide you an access token and documentation for using the API.
These days you have all sorts of trust badges available to put on your websites. Some are SSL badges, some are good business practices badges and some are even carbon neutral certification badges. But do these badges have any effect?
A Visual Website Optimizer user, Karsten Lund (a conversion specialist from Optimeria.com), recently carried out a six-month long A/B test to determine whether an E-mark badge (certifies ethical conduct of Danish businesses) impacts conversion rate. He wrote a detailed case study in Danish and we recommend you to read it here (if you understand the language). For those who prefer to read the case study in English, read this post instead.
What was tested?
Karsten tested the presence of E-mark (the eye-like icon in the image above) on an eCommerce store House of Kids. 50% visitors saw this badge and 50% didn’t. The test started producing great results right from the start but our team consulted Karsten to run the test longer so that he can be really sure about the significance of the results.
What was the result?
Yes, you read it right, a 32% increase in conversions with the E-mark badge. And Karsten ran the test long enough to make sure result was statistically significant.
Interesting nuggets
A lot of other users agree with him, though.
Grain of Salt
Even though this particular result has been fantastic, you shouldn’t adopt trust badges on your website without testing them first. Different types of websites/badges combinations may have different results. Elsewhere on Internet, some report an increase in sales, some report a decrease in sales. So, the best strategy is to test it first and then only implement it on your website.
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