Good news, Visual Website Optimizer was covered in TechCrunch a few days back! For those who aren’t aware about this mighty blog, it is considered to be one of the most influential technology blogs on the planet. Getting covered on TechCrunch is a (ego) milestone for many web startups and it was surely one of the events that we keenly looked forward to. This blog post summarizes our perspective on getting covered on a major blog and what effect did it really have on us.
How we managed to get covered by TechCrunch?
Love it or hate it, all major technology blogs (TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, etc.) get more than a hundred pitches from startups daily. Even if your startup is truly spectacular, getting them to notice you could be a big deal. With so many pitches to evaluate, the blogs have justifiably come to evolve some heuristics. For example, if your pitch comes through a trusted source (say a VC or a someone journalist personally knows), it will be at least taken seriously (and not piled up along the 100s of daily pitches these blogs get). Better still, if you have a good pedigree (founded a successful startup before?) or belong to an incubator program (such as Y-combinator or Techstars), it is pretty likely that your startup will be covered on such major blogs.
So, does that mean it game over for self-funded startups who have no “special connections” (such as your very own: Visual Website Optimizer)? No, we are a proof that the TechCrunch club is not hyper-exclusive and if your startup has a good product or service, they will eventually cover you. Yes, it took us more than two months of follow ups and reminders but our persistence paid off eventually. The key word while pitching to major blogs is persistence. Realize that they get truck-loads of pitches daily and it is natural that they can’t write about each one of them. But by being persistent in asking them to at least evaluate your pitch, you differentiate yourself by showing that you are not mass-mailing your pitch and are really serious about getting covered on that particular blog!
Of course, you don’t want to annoy the journalists by not respecting their time. Sending a gentle reminder or fresh updates about your startup (such as new features, traction, social proof, new customers) every two weeks or so should be enough.
The effect of getting covered by TechCrunch
Here is a screenshot from our Analytics program:
As you can see, TechCrunch sent about 3100 visitors. To be honest, this is less than what we had expected. Probably this was because we were covered on Friday as traffic dropped to 360 on Saturday and then to 95 on Sunday. Hence, it’s best to pray that you get covered on a weekday (it is said that Tuesday is the best).
A great thing about the TechCrunch traffic is that it’s very engaging. In every engagement metric (watching video, time on site, bounce rate, pages per session), that traffic was 20-30% better than our average site traffic.
However, this audience (even though was more engaged) had converted (free trial signups) worse than the average traffic. In fact, the drop in conversion rate for TechCrunch traffic was 34% less than normal traffic. One plausible hypothesis is that the TechCrunch blog readers come across new startups on a daily basis. So, while they are curious about what this new shiny thing is about, very less actually try it out. (That said, even though conversion rate this traffic was less, remember that all these conversions are a bonus for us as they are in addition to number of signups we would normally get through our regular site traffic.)
Indirect effects
Though we don’t have exact numbers here, we could sense a definite explosion of interest last week. We got contacted by a few VCs/angels and also there were a couple of enquiries for partnerships. We also believe that there was a definitive bump in our SEO rankings for key terms: a/b testing, multivariate testing and split testing. The number of bookmarks on Delicious also surpassed 1000 (in fact, 1123 bookmarks as of today). A great side-effect of this was that many of our existing customers noticed the TechCrunch post and it reinforced their confidence in the product and the team. (Many of them personally congratulated us, which surely felt good!)
The TechCrunch effect is short-lived but worth it
TechCrunch covers a lot of startup/technology related news. Within a week of getting covered, we are already on page 10 of the blog so the impact of the post is short-lived. So, what we have learned from all this? Within a week, things will get back to normal. The world doesn’t really change if your startup gets covered or not, but the immediate exposure and validity that TechCrunch brings is really worth the effort of asking them to write about your startup.
Good luck to your startup if you pitch!
Visual Website Optimizer is finally out of beta! It has been five months since we first announced the beta, but with all new features and bug fixes etc. it feels like an incredibly short period.
We also announced the pricing plans. There has been a lot of research gone into it, did various iterations of it and now finally settled on the one you can see. Most of our beta users thought this pricing is fair, so we are happy with their reaction. You will notice that there are various paid plans suiting all kinds of businesses and agencies. Additionally, we are offering a 30 day unrestricted free trial for the tool.
Limited Time Launch Offer
We are offering tons (2x-5x) of additional visitors tested in all plans till 15th June 2010. That means if you buy a paid package now, you will get additional visitors every month in your account (even after the offer ends). We think it is great way to thank beta testers and other early users who contributed a lot in shaping the software.
Thank you all! The journey to rule A/B testing world has just started 
With Visual Website Optimizer, we like to keep things extremely simple. However, don’t mistake simplicity of VWO for less number of features. It is the job of a good UI designer to present a tool in layered fashion: core essential features being obvious to most users, while letting advanced users use plethora of other features by uncovering options as and when needed. That is what we have done with the latest new feature in VWO. It is a feature a minority of advanced users will ever need, but we still added it to VWO for completeness sake.
Here is the new feature: now you can define wildcards in split URLs too. Allow us to explain. Suppose you want to split test your entire website (and not just a single page). Maybe you are testing different themes or maybe you are testing different sidebar location or testing different placement of ads. While with CSS testing this is anyway possible without the hassles of creating separate versions of your complete website, but let’s assume you have created two or more versions of your complete website.
Now the challenge with other (free or paid) testing tools (and until now with VWO) is that you can’t do split traffic on the whole website! You need to specify a single page, and the tool redirects the visitor to one of the variation URLs and determines which one works best. However, such a strategy won’t work for site-wide split test because a visitor can land on any site page, and not just the specified page.
So, what we have done is to allow using wildcards in test page URL and variation URL. Check out the screenshot below:
Do you see the wildcard (*) here? Using it in your test URL will redirect the visitor to any page of your website (example http://www.wingify.com/contact-us.php) to corresponding page on variation website (example http://www.wingify.com/b/contact-us.php).
What’s more exciting is that you can even use multiple wildcards. If you are running an exotic test, then perhaps your control will be http://*.example.com/* and your variation will be http://www.example.com/b/*/*. Corresponding * in variation URLs are replaced by what matches in the control.
Hope you like the new feature. Please let us know your feedback, ideas, comments or suggestions though the comment box below or email us at info@wingfiy.com
We get bored (and frustrated) if we think it has been long since we last stretched the limits of A/B testing. So, in order to kill boredom and feel happy, we added a new feature to Visual Website Optimizer. The new feature, called Browse Mode, allows you to browse your website inside the visual designer and design tests spanning multiple pages. It even allows you to interact with login or other forms, so that you can create tests for the locked in parts of your application.
Have a look at the following 2 minute screencast which demonstrates how to create an A/B test inside (Wordpress) application:
Other uses of browse mode:
Technical details on how we did it:
Handling login forms and sessions inside the designer actually proved to be little tricky because cookies were involved. Every time you login into an application, the server sends back a few text files (known as cookies) which your browser is required to send back to the server with each subsequent request. Browsers handle this seamlessly for you however since Visual Website Optimizer’s test designer acts as a proxy between your browser and your server, we cannot simply pass on that job to the browser. So, we ended up implementing the cookie storage functionality of browser inside the VWO itself. It was fun and quite satisfying when we finally made it work. Though there are some edge cases that we haven’t handled so in rare cases, the login functionality may not work for all websites and apps.
In our mission to be the best A/B testing platform on earth, we have recently updated Visual Website Optimizer architecture. This blog post updates what has changed and why.
Prelude: phasing out of optional page tagging code
In addition to tag-less testing which required no code changes, VWO had optional code for people who liked to tag their pages with code (like other free testing tools). As we all know it, tagging is frustrating, cumbersome and error-prone. So, we have dropped it all together from VWO. No user used this feature and it only created confusion.
Meaner: multiple tests on a SINGLE page possible now
Until now you could run only one test per page. While this is the way it should actually be, some advanced users ran a site wide test (for example, on footer or sidebar) and then they wanted to test a specific page also. With old architecture, one could run only one test per page so VWO only ran the most recent test on that specific page. The old architecture also meant that if one of the site pages is a test goal, you couldn’t run a different test on that page. This was especially frustrating to users who ran multiple A/B tests across their funnels.
But ALL this has changed. You can now run multiple tests on a single page or run tests on a page which is a conversion goal for a different test. A note of warning: we actually discourage multiple tests on a single page because it jeopardizes statistical significance of those tests. It is best to avoid such a condition.
Faster: asynchronous content loading
Now onwards, the content of test variations will be loaded asynchronously without stalling browser. This means while VWO is fetching variation content, browser can keep loading your rest of the page. This feature will make the tests noticeably faster, especially if you had lots of content in your variations.
Leaner: 10% smaller JavaScript code
We used Google’s excellent Closure Compiler to shorten the code by 10%. The current size of shortened, gzipped code stands at about 26.5 KB. Most of this code is JQuery, which VWO uses quite heavily (because it so awesome!).
Smaller JavaScript file means less data to download for your visitors and hence faster tests.
Overall Thoughts
We are committed to faster loading tests for your visitors. Every millisecond of delay frustrates visitors and we perfectly understand the importance of page load time for your business. Rest assured our engineers are fanatics about optimization (in all senses of the word). Do let us know your feedback on the updates and if you have any ideas/suggestions on making the test loading even faster.
