Optimizely

Optimizely is a cool analytics platform you can use to help improve your marketing and advertising efforts with split testing various configurations called multi-variants in order to see which works best, so you can scale up traffic to the successful pages to maximize your return on investment. They have a great free plan with a lot of value so you can get started within a couple of minutes. When I first logged into the dashboard I was impressed with the user interface. It's very clean and simple while easy to use. I was able to import our sweepstakes landing page and create a split test for it in under an hour. This platform has a paid plan which allows you to split test more than a single page but rather an entire sales funnel with it's multi-page testing to go with the multi-variant testing. It's a very data driven SAAS but is highly visual and makes it easy to make complex changes very easily. You can measure a variety of different conversions such as user generated content, registrations, subscriber downloads, sales or even donations. You can optimize for web based campaigns, mobile campaigns or specifically iOS or Android based campaign optimization which is great. And each is as simple as the next to setup and get going relatively quickly. You can segment visitors to your pages and use that data to improve your performance whether it be increased revenue, sign ups, and overall customer engagement. I am very happy with the free plan. It's rare for an analytics or reporting company to give away this much value because the data discovery possible by using it is directly connected to your growing your revenue and return on investment, while it shows you how to tweak it for better growth based on your own testing, so this most commonly a premium paid feature and I really appreciate that about Optimizely. It's great that you can develop quite quickly with this tool including HTML and CSS. The results can be shared with others from your dashboard. There is a nice selection of documentation and resources to help you learn how to get the most out of this software and approach to improving campaigns.

If you don't have a product or service available and ready with your sales funnel you won't be able to take advantage of the value in your Optimizely account. The free account doesn't allow you to track by location which is too bad. We are a start up and can't really afford their premium plan at this moment though look forward to this. Meanwhile we'll have to stick to Google Analytics and other means of split testing. I've read larger experiments can take a bit to load due to caching but I've not experienced this as of yet.

There are four general components of any online business; content, technology, traffic and conversions. The conversions aspect is awesome because it means your product or service is developed enough that you have traffic going to it whether it be organic and word of mouth based, or paid traffic such as pay per click advertising or display advertising. This is when you can test variants within your pages and funnel to know which resonate and convert best in your target audience and demographic. As an organization you can do a lot of work that previously relied on a dedicated expert in whichever coding language you're using. Now with a rudimentary understanding you can do a lot yourself. Optimizely basically makes a lot happen in a few clicks but there is room for advanced customization and configuration as well.