VWO Rolls Out New Platform for Analysis and Testing

Alas! their favorite CRO testing and analysis platform has finally come to the rescue by rolling out major changes to their software. Ever since they joined up with Visual Website Optimizer, we’ve been utilizing their amazing testing features, but only touched the surface of their analysis platter. Now, EVERYTHING has changed.

First things first, let’s explain why this is so huge. For a long time, analysis like heatmaps, scrollmaps, and recordings have been limited to using only 5% of a sample size to a web page. In a nutshell, if you had 100 users visit your homepage, they were only able to track 5 of them. Now that we’re out of Beta, we’re gathering data on all 100!

It’s important to understand that while A/B testing is great and changed the game for internet marketers, the mystery behind users and their behavior was only partly validated. In order to solve that mystery, they use the analysis behind it to get more granular. they ask questions like, “where is everyone clicking?” “Where is everyone leaving the site?” “What content is serving the highest purpose?”

VWO explains the evolution of A/B testing over the past 7 years:

A/B Testing Maturity

Stage I – No A/B Tests
Stage II – Occasional A/B Testing
Stage III – Process-oriented A/B Testing
Stage IV – A/B Testing is a part of the company culture

“VWO, when it first came out in 2010, caused online marketers to move from Stage I to Stage II. What we’re launching now will lead marketers to move from Stage II to Stage III. (Stage IV refers to companies which live and breathe A/B testing not only in web functioning but also in every other thing they do.)” – Paras Chopra, VWO

Now that they have full access to the platform in its Alpha stage, we’re able to utilize what is called the “Process Oriented A/B Platform”. It looks like this:

Everything regarding measurement, research, and analysis are now the wild west. they have full capability to open up the floodgates of traffic into their analysis, paving the way for better experiments and better results.

Lots of good stuff. Notably, the Goals and Analyze sections.

Within Goals, they have goals and funnels. This feature was buggy before, but now they can set specific goals on their desired websites and track them thoroughly, for example, reference the following:

Client A is an ecommerce site selling shoes. they want to track users from the home page, to the shop page, to a single product, to the cart, to checkout, to final purchase. they now have the ability to map this out individually and accurately track conversion rates from each. Simple, right? This is where it gets specific…

With funnels up and working, they can now interlink these goals into full user paths. So let’s say Client A wants to track where people are losing their customers. they now can string the goals together so that a single user is tracked from point A (home) to point F (purchase). they can now analyze users dropping off at point C (single product) and know why… Maybe they couldn’t find the “Add to Cart” button, or cycled through the shoe’s images and felt they weren’t clear enough. This feature now helps us make changes so they follow the whole journey and make a purchase.

This is their “Track”. We’re happy to show you VWO’s backend that accomplishes this:

But this is only step 1. Check out the rest of the recommended plan of action, below.

Analyze

This capability includes tools such as session recordings (see playback of visitors interacting with your website), on-site surveys, heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps, and form analytics.
This capability lets you dig deeper into visitor behavior (from multiple angles) and find out what’s causing some visitors to abandon your website or landing pages.

Plan

This capability provides you and your team one dashboard to record and prioritize your observations, ideas, and hypotheses; and help you select ideas for your next web tests.
Imagine this to be like Trello or Jira for your conversion optimization.

Test

This capability lets you test and experiment through multiple ways, such as visual A/B tests that do not require coding, multivariate tests, and complex tests that can be set up by using JavaScript and split traffic tests.
This capability has been their forte, and they have enhanced it in numerous ways with this release.

Target

This capability lets you deploy your winning tests or provide a specific experience to your target segment.
This capability also allows you to slice-and-dice your user segments and improve the conversion rate, for different segments by targeting a specific experience to them.

Some of the technology they got from their acquisition of Navilytics in 2015, but most of it is built in-house. All VWO teams worked hard for many months, because they have a deep conviction that one integrated platform has more advantages for marketers than juggling with different tools.

The value of an integrated platform is a bet they are taking and they are confident of demonstrating that value to marketers all over the world. When you take the new VWO for a test drive (see below, on how to get access), you will see the power of integration first hand but if you need a few examples of what this integration can do, see the following use cases:

You set up the funnel in the VWO Track capability and discover that for a specific segment, your checkout rate is much below average. What’s causing that drop?
You immediately use the VWO Analyze capability to look at session recordings for that segment, look at form analytics, and fire up an on-site survey to ask why that specific user segment is abandoning sign-up.
You immediately use the VWO Analyze capability to look at session recordings for that segment, look at form analytics, and fire up an on-site survey to ask why that specific visitor segment is abandoning sign-up.
While looking at the form analytics in VWO Analyze, you realize that the checkout form accepts a US phone number only and the segment from UK has a low conversion rate. But then you see that you received a few responses from the survey that you ran by using VWO Analyze. The most common response is that your UK visitors are not sure whether you ship to UK or not. Now you have another insight here.
But now your problem is which one to test. Plus, you also have many other such ideas from your last week’s idea brainstorm with your team. You are flooded with ideas, but don’t want to lose these 2 observations. You then remember the VWO Plan capability and use the form tool and survey to record the 2 observations in VWO Plan. (This is in addition to your team continuously using the VWO Chrome plug-in to record ideas from your and your competitors’ websites.)
You fire up VWO Plan and prioritize your ideas by attaching the expected effort versus expected results. When you are done, you realize that “Lack of shipping-to-UK information while they look like the US website” is the best among other ideas to test.
From that observation, you get into the VWO’s Test capability where you set up a quick test that takes you 10 minutes. All you need to do is to mention “they ship to UK free of cost” when the visitor is from UK. (An added advantage of this link is that all your observations and notes regarding “Lack of shipping-to-UK information while they look like a US website” get attached to this test so that you can revisit this anytime in future. Your hypothesis was wrong. It will be great to have this context while looking at results, wouldn’t it?)
Your VWO test concludes, and you have a winner. You know that your IT team takes time to implement it at the back end, so you use VWO Target to make the winning version live for all UK visitors.
After a week or so, you go back to VWO Track and see an increase in the checkout rate for UK visitors. You are happy, tell your colleagues and boss, and they are happy too.
You repeat this process over months and accumulate your wins, losses, and insights at one place, that is, the VWO CRO. As a result, your success rate increases with each passing month.

As you can see, there is a lot to digest. I hope we made it clear just how valuable the platform is in its new form!

If you’d like to learn more, please contact [email protected] for CRO help today.