OpenText Optimost vs. VWO

The ease of implementation combined with the managed services result in a tool that virtually anyone can use - implementation is less than 10 lines of code added to the relevant pages of the website (we simply added it to our master page template to have it available on any page) and from there the customer can be as involved or not involved as they wish. At BSI we are very hands on with the testing programme - usually developing and designing the tests ourselves and having HP build them, but if we wanted to HP to develop, design and build and limit our role to QA and review that is an option.

Our marketing team does a lot of creative testing around messaging and imagery. VWO is well suited for this type of testing and can yield great results if you define your conversion goals correctly. However, when we have tried to do more substantial/advanced changes through VWO (such as re-positioning content or modifying elements in a form), we have had some challenges and not been able to get the desired tests working correctly.

Incentivized

• Because it is a managed service the need for intervention by our internal IT group was removed. This allowed us to control the pace of the testing programme without being influenced by IT resource allocation
• The client and technical account managers are very good at suggesting tests or potential improvements
• HP regularly holds custom forums which are always informative and provide an opportunity to learn from and network with peers and industry leaders

• VWO has a strong support team willing to help provide answers to questions during the setup process. During setup, we had some questions regarding implementation across a significant number of sites and they were able to ease dev team concerns and provide detailed best practices to streamline integration.
• Some of the initial results of a few of the initial tests raised some questions internally. We setup a call and were able to quickly address the questions and find some opportunities to leverage moving forward.
• I discovered a bug within the UI that lead to some questions internally. I was able to report it and the problem was fixed rather quickly and their team followed up with a thank you for reporting it and to report the issue was now resolved.

Incentivized

• The dashboard interface is difficult to navigate, but I understand that they are currently developing/testing a new much more user friendly interface
• The cost can be a barrier for some organisations, but for us it is worth it. Also they are in the process of releasing a less expensive self authoring testing tool.

• The heatmaps within A/B tests are overlayed on the live website. Unfortunately, these don't work properly when scrolling down the site.
• I am missing an overview of all my custom conversions. I can only see a list of frequently used goals while setting up an A/B test, which may or may not include all custom conversions.

Incentivized

We have not only renewed our subscription three years running, but we have added the self authoring tool and are looking to expand the subscription so that we can take advantage of the managed services on a global level.

Visual Website Optimizer is a easy to use and powerful tool for testing web pages. We use it to test lead generation websites to increase the number of people that complete a form. Before we decided to go with Visual Website Optimizer we did research into other options and found Visual Website Optimizer to be one of the best.

Overall VWO is quite good with general user usability, and every person who has had to take up the mantle of using the tool itself has found it manageable. However there is definitely some room for improvement - again, perhaps this is particularly the case because we are running a large number of tests in a number of different languages (and markets, and countries!) which requires a lot of upkeep.

Incentivized

I have not experienced an application error or unplanned outage with VWO.

Incentivized

VWO doesn't appear to slow down our website at all, though some customers with adblockers like UBlock Origin have been known to not see entire pages if VWO is making changes to the page at a macro level (background, font, etc). This is rare though.

Incentivized

While their online document support is lacking a simple email to their support team will almost always get responded to the next day. It has however taken more than one email to explain the problem to the support team till they understood the problem. The solution I was given also only half fixed the problem the rest I figured out on my own.

Training was good, just limited to the onboarding process. They walked through all of the steps it takes to get started in VWO and each of the modules, along with giving us ideas for starting our first test. I feel like it could be better if there was a guided process within the VWO program to continue to educate you along the way, and a way to turn that off for experienced users.

Incentivized

Overall, the implementation of VWO is straightforward. If you've got a straightforward way of deploying code to all of your test pages, either a good CMS or a TMS, then implementation should be a breeze. There is no tweaking to be done to the code itself, and once deployed it has the flexibility to cope with different VWO modules (tracking, conversion analysis, session analysis) without modification.

Incentivized

We evaluated Optimost again Adobe's similar offering (Target). The big difference between the two and the reason why BSI choose Autonomy was the managed service aspect. The idea that once the code was deployed on the site IT no longer had to be involved gave my team full ownership of the testing programme. With the Adobe product, the involvement of the internal IT group would have been required to launch each test - and this would have decreased the number of tests we could run each month. Back in the day I also used offermatica/omniture and this too required IT involvement.

VWO is by far the easiest tool to use among all experimentation tools. It is like the experimentation tool for dummies and works as well as the others. A highlight would be the reports on every test because compared to the others, in VWO is way much easier to understand the metrics and the test performance.

Incentivized

The product seems infinitely scalable for our needs (small business) and we've never had any issue with loading VWO-edited elements. I will say, though, that online customers with ad blockers have been known to not see certain VWO elements as their third-party scripts are disabled.

Incentivized

• Use HP Optimost was the primary driver behind a 40% increase in UK classroom training courses booked online read more details here: http://www.autonomy.com/work/news/details/hsx6767d
• HP Optimost testing led to a 9% increase in sales by improving the BSI Shop's checkout funnel in 2012
• HP Optimost is integral to the success of BSI's continuous improvement testing programme

• Our clients have seen significant increases in engagement and conversion rates through changes we recommended after using VWO to test our hypotheses.
• Our clients and internal teams have appreciated the level of granular detail available within the platform, as more information leads to more reliable optimization suggestions.

Incentivized