Optimizing Optimizely: How we used Optimizely to get the best from Episerver.com
From having an idea for your website to making a testable change and seeing the impact on your audience: it’s really quick with Optimizely Web.
Before Episerver acquired Optimizely (and re-branded to Optimizely), we didn’t do much in the way of experimentation on the Episerver.com website. We got started fast with Optimizely Web. After a short tutorial, we developed ideas about simple changes we could make and test. The team started out with ideation – brainstorming to generate ideas for experiments. Part of this process was learning how to frame hypotheses. This means defining the problem to be solved; describing the solution; and selecting the metrics for success. The latter is critical: measuring results against criteria for success or failure is at the heart of data-driven optimization. Initially, we were looking especially for low-hanging fruit that would give us quick wins.
Now we have a range of experiments running, including not just A/B testing, but also multi-variate testing on multiple pages. Here are some examples.
Sticky navigation
One experiment we have already completed involved “sticky navigation”. When you’re scrolling down a page on a website, perhaps very far down the page, it can be hard to find your way back to the item which initially caught your interest. We wanted to decrease website bounce rate. Our hypothesis was that if the main navigation is always visible, it will increase visitor interaction.
With sticky navigation, a menu remains visible even as you scroll. Not only was the feature easy to implement with Optimizely Web, it was also easy to measure the impact by tracking how many people interacted with it: More users were starting to click our navigation and even the included demo button. We soon saw that it really made a difference, and we’ve implemented it as a default feature for the website. That experiment is over, and it was a success.
When you scroll down pages on episerver.com you’ll now see the navigation menu reappears immediately when you start to scroll up.
Multi-variate CTAs
Another experiment we are currently running involves the top right corner CTA button on Episerver.com. We are testing what copy to put in the button: “Free demo”, “Request demo”, “Get a demo”. And if combining the red CTA button with a second button, “Talk to us”, might increase conversations with us through our chatbot.
Chat sequences are normally started by the user clicking the bot as it appears in the bottom right corner. This experiment provides an additional way of starting a conversation with us via the chat bot for people who might not be ready to request a demo, but still want to interact with us.
This experiment is still ongoing and as we reach significant test results you will see the winning variation on episerver.com.
One of the 6 variations for the top right CTAs we are currently testing.
Customized user experience – using promo cards
We also implemented new promo cards, using the Optimizely Web extensions, which we can use to promote high value assets – for example, the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for DXPs report. We now have separate promo cards for the Episerver.com customer hub and partner portal (requires partner login details), surfacing different content to those two different audiences.
Optimizely Web provides us direct access to statistics showing how many people clicked the promo card, and also how many converted (by filling a form) after clicking the promo card. One thing we like about the Optimizely Web data is that you can immediately tell whether the results are statistically significant – if you have enough data to be able to see whether the change or variant is truly effective.
Promo card sliding in from the right on the episerver.com Customer hub promoting upcoming Product Roadmap webinar.
Making corrections
In addition to experimentation, Optimizely Web also enables you to make changes to any page element that you, as a web editor, would not normally be able to edit using Episerver Content Cloud. Changes that would require the help from a developer.
We recently noticed a small error: we needed to remove a page element to a specific page as it did not work properly with mobile browsers. Thanks to Optimizely Web we quickly could fix the error without the need of developers.
Embracing experimentation
Many of us in the Episerver Digital team are still beginners at using Optimizely Web. But even as beginners we see this is a great tool to quickly test ideas you may not have been able to realize because it has been too time consuming to even launch the tests. With Optimizely Web it really is very easy and fast to go from ideation to implementing a testable change on the website.
Learn more about how you can add Optimizely Web to your Episerver platform.