Vendor Spotlight

Easy Multivariate Testing with Visual Website Optimizer

August 30, 2010 By Manoj Jasra 2 Comments

Testing is an essential part of online strategies and Visual Website Optimizer is an ideal tool to help you get up and running with AB/Multivariate testing very quickly. I had a chance to chat with Founder, Paras Chopra to get his insight into Visual Website Optimizer.

Manoj:Give us the ‘elevator pitch’ on your technology.

Paras Chopra: Visual Website Optimizer is the world’s easiest A/B and multivariate testing tool. Meant for marketers who want to take charge of conversion rate optimization for their business, the tool eliminating involvement of IT resources by removing all HTML code and integration hassles. Using the tool, a marketer can rapidly test headlines, images, buttons, forms, styling, layout etc. to find out the best converting version of the landing page and/or website. Till now 2000+ enterprises, small businesses and agencies have used the tool to increase sales and conversion rates by as much as 90%.

Manoj:Can you please highlight some of the features which provide the most value?

Paras Chopra: There are three main features in Visual Website Optimizer that provide most value. The first one is the tagless integration where you we require a user to upload a small snippet of code into his/her website only once and after that s/he can create unlimited number of (different kinds of) tests without needing to touch code ever again. So, we don’t require the user to add separate code for separate sections of test or for different conversion goals. The single code snippet works any kind of test that a marketer might want to do. This saves a lot of time, that would have otherwise be spend in integrating every new test into the website.

The second valuable feature is the WYSIWYG editor which lets a marketer create variations using a familiar, MS-Word like interface. S/he is not required to know HTML or JavaScript while creating a test. This really speeds up the tests. So for an example, if you want to do a simple test involving button and headline change. You can select those sections in the visual test designer and then simply change the button and headline in WYSIWYG editor. That’s it and you are done. No HTML; no technical complexities. Here is a screenshot:

Clickmaps and heatmaps is another feature that our customers love. In addition to quantitative conversion rate report, in our tool you also get access to a heatmap which shows visually which parts of your page (or test variation) gets mosts clicks. Our users love this report because it complements the conversion rate data they have and it shows other opportunities on page for optimization. Here is an example:

Manoj:What is your competitive advantage over similar technology?

Paras Chopra: Our competitive advantage is the usability of the tool, our focus on marketers and the price-point for the features we offer. Ours is the first and only tool that makes A/B and multivariate testing a fun and easy job. Fun because the tagless integration allows you to always keep testing your hypothesis without worrying about implementation. So, for example, if you want to do a quick test to finding out if ‘Add to Cart’ works better than ‘Buy Now’ you can create and execute that test in less than 10 minutes. And since reports are realtime you can instantly start getting feedback on your test variations. All these minor features that promote ease-of-use add up to make Visual Website Optimizer the only “marketer-friendly” testing tool out there.

Manoj:Who is your intended target market?

Paras Chopra: Our target market is divided into three segments: a) small/medium sized businesses who do testing in house; b) marketing agencies & consultancies; and c) large enterprises. Our current customer base is a mix of these three segments. Even though our focus has been one SMBs and agencies, we are starting to see great response from enterprises as well. For example, today we have Microsoft, Rackspace, 99Designs, Threadless, AWeber, amongst other enterprise users. In all we have 2000+ users (in first 6 months of launching).

Manoj:Tell us about new features/integrations/improvements that are on your product road map

Paras Chopra: Soon we are going to launch the report segmentation and targeting feature which will allow you to segment test results by different parameters: country, traffic source, search keyword, time of day, etc. So, you will be easily analyze if one of your variations works better for a particular segment (say visitors from UK who searched for “shoes”). That variation may not be overall winner but if it works best for a particular segment, we will then allow the user to setup targeting to always show that particular variation to that particular segment. We believe the segmentation and targeting feature will take our product to the next level because marketers and analysts will have all CRO resources and tools within a single application: testing, analyzing and targeting.

For SMBs and agencies, pricing plans range from $49-$249/month. For enterprises (or other users) with large traffic requirements, we have custom plans where the price typically ranges from $500-$3000 per month.

Filed Under: A/B Testing, multivariate testing, Vendor Spotlight, Web Analytics

Inside Klout: Measuring Your Online Influence

August 19, 2010 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 0 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Earlier this week I sat down with Klout’s Megan Berry to get some of her insight into Klout’s technology.

Give us the ‘elevator pitch’ on your technology.

Klout measures online influence. We believe everyone who creates content online has influence and our goal is to understand and measure it.

Klout measure influence based on the ability to drive action. How many followers you have does not give a good picture of how many people actually listen or engage with you. Instead, we measure social gestures such as retweets, @mentions, and lists to better understand how much engagement you have as well as who those people are (is your engaged network influential or not, etc.).

Can you please highlight some of the features which provide the most value?

Klout Score as a filter (in various applications it is useful to filter by Klout Score when monitoring mentions, in search etc), topical influence, klout class (determines your influence style)

What is your competitive advantage over similar technology?

We offer the most in-depth analysis out there.

Who is your intended target market?

We have multiple markets. Anyone who creates content online could be interested in understanding and measuring their influence. Brands and marketers are, of course, very interested in understanding who the influential people are. Also, we have over 600 applications using our API to integrate Klout Scores into their applications.

Tell us about new features/integrations/improvements that are on your product road map?

We will be integrating new services soon — with Facebook being the next one of the way. We will also be surfacing our topical data more so people can use Klout to understand who are the key influencers on specific topics such as mobile or fashion.

Screenshots below:

Filed Under: social media, Twitter, Vendor Spotlight, Web Analytics

Inside Look at PostRank Analytics

August 16, 2010 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

PostRank is a leading provider of content engagement and real-time data analysis solutions. I was able to catch up PostRank’s Community Manager, Melanie Baker, who gave me a great walk through of PostRank Analytics. Check out our chat below, if you’re interested in test driving PostRank Analytics use the special coupon code, “WAWblog” (no quotation marks) you’ll receive three free months instead of one. https://analytics.postrank.com/register

Give us the ‘elevator pitch’ on your technology.

Over 80% of the engagement with a publisher’s content now happens off the originating website, typically on social networks like Twitter or Facebook, and social hubs like Digg or Delicious. PostRank Analytics enables publishers to discover and track that off-site audience and engagement in real-time and learn when, where, and how people are engaging with their content.

Can you please highlight some of the features which provide the most value?

Activity stream provides a real-time, aggregated view of all the engagement activity related to a publisher’s content.
Variable graphing over time displays trending to help track what content performs best and on which networks and hubs.
Optimize functionality analyzes all of the activity around a publisher’s content on some of the most popular networks (Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Reddit – more coming soon!), identifies your fans and influencers on each hub. The same view displays how each network ranks publishers’ content, and how to optimize for each to grow audience and reach.
Google Analytics integration enables publishers to pull information from their Google Analytics account into PostRank Analytics, creating a 360 degree on-site/off-site view of content’s performance.
ROI Measurement enables publishers to see how their content is performing by using an “earned value”, which is based on the total engagement accumulated by the post. It enables tracking of ROI for on-site and off-site engagement all in one place.

What is your competitive advantage over similar technology?

PostRank monitors over 25 social engagement sources and tracks millions of engagement activities each day, providing the most comprehensive set of social web analytics available. Keyword-based monitoring, for example, turns up massive amounts of spam and other garbage, and sifting through that is a monumental task. We avoid that entirely.

Who is your intended target market?

Content publishers, which ranges from individual bloggers who’ve moved beyond the hobbyist phase, to companies and agencies.

Tell us about new features/integrations/improvements that are on your product road map.

A few things we’re working on include filtering of stories and engagement, exporting and reporting for Analytics data, and multi-author support.

Pricing Info: PostRank Analytics is $9/month or $99/year. Additionally, those who sign up for our new Connect service (http://connect.postrank.com/) get a permanently free Analytics account.

Screenshots of PostRank Analytics:

Filed Under: Vendor Spotlight, Web Analytics

Twitalyzer: Analytics Meets Twitter

August 12, 2010 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Analytics meets Twitter via Twitalyzer and since I love both technologies, I had to get some more detail on Twitalyzer via co-founder, Jeff Katz. Check out our chat below.

Give us the ‘elevator pitch’ on your technology.

Twitalyzer is social media’s most complete application for measuring impact, engagement and influence on Twitter.

Can you please highlight some of the features which provide the most value?

While we have been very diligent about only adding functionally that will bring immediate value to our end-users, there are a few features that folks really like.

Activity by Day is our trending report. It is, in my opinion, the most powerful report in Twitalyzer. You can view all the Twitalyzer metrics and measures in one report and quickly switch between the measures and various time ranges. You can also set time-based annotations within the report so if something noteworthy, like a campaign kick-off or industry event took place, you can indicate that and see if that effected the overall trends.
The Goals report allows organizations to set benchmarks based on several key metrics. Since our roots are in web analytics and digital measurement, we believe it is important for companies, large and small, to set achievable benchmarks to work against. You can also visually seeing how close you are to meeting those goals in the Activity by Day report
We recently introduced two new network-related reports that users really love. The Network Activity report allows you to see the hours of the day that your followers are most active. This gives businesses insight into what time of day is best to tweet and when not to. The Network Explorer is a powerful (and addictive!) visualization tool of your network. You can see not only your immediate network, but then drill-down to your network’s network.
Find New is essentially a discovery tool to find Twitter users based on different Twitalyzer criteria. Once you find the segment of users, you can follow them in Twitter as well as create lists in Twitalyzer and Twitter. Once you create a list in Twitalyzer, it is saved in the Lists report where you can see how is the most impactful in that particular group.

What is your competitive advantage over similar technology?

I would say our biggest completive advantage is our team’s combined experience enmeshed in the digital measurement space. We have lived and breathed analytics for so many years now, it runs in our veins. From a practical point-of-view, Twitalyzer has been in service since late 2008 and have amassed a fairly large database of accounts that have been Twitalyzed (i.e. processed).

Who is your intended target market?

Our intended target market is simple. Any organization that is serious about measuring their overall impact and engagement on Twitter. Our clients range from Fortune 100 companies to PR agencies to local non-profits. If you want to do a vanity check on your personal Twitter account, we are probably not the right service.

Tell us about new features/integrations/improvements that are on your product road map.

We are working on our 4.0 roadmap as we speak, so it’s a bit premature to discuss that, but I promise to give you an update in the near future.

Screenshots of Twitalyzer below:

Network Explorer