CRO Insights Series: Spotlight on VWO

Optimising conversions and customer experiences has always been a challenge for eCommerce businesses. A recent Mollie report revealed that 65% of the surveyed businesses consider increasing conversion rates as one of their major challenges alongside acquiring the right traffic/users (Growth Mindset Merchants, Mollie 2020).

The answer to this challenge is CRO and an experimentation mindset. However, while many businesses are mature in terms of organic and performance marketing, they are yet to include experimentation and personalisation in their website optimisation strategy.

Though eCommerce businesses are at the forefront of embedding conversion rate optimisation into their optimisation strategy, there’s still a vast scope for CRO in the digital world. In this third post of our CRO Insights Series, we speak with leading experimentation platform VWO on the importance of digital optimisation.

VWO’s Siddhartha Kathpalia, Product and Content Marketing Lead, and Aniruddh Jain, Demand Generation Lead, tell us how the digital optimisation landscape is changing and what businesses can do to come out on top of the optimisation game.

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What new trends have you observed in the last year in optimisation?

The two key trends we’ve observed relate to the use of machine learning in optimisation and the evolution of optimisation not in just digital experience but in overall resource management.

With GPT-3, many tools have introduced AI-driven optimisation. This opens new doors for faster optimisation, more automation with testing (which means testing at scale), and better utilisation of time to achieve growth goals faster.

Since automated bidding entered the world of performance marketing and algorithms became smarter, experimentation and optimisation have also started embracing this form of automation, freeing up human time to focus on more and other areas.

In the past year, optimisation has continued to grow as an industry and as a skill set. More and more people are learning the art of optimisation and plugging in various fields, more than ever before. Businesses are now based on rigorous optimisation of resources and their environment, and this trend is likely to continue.

What do you forecast are going to be key for eCommerce in the next 12 months when it comes to optimisation?

eCommerce was an early adopter for vanilla client-side optimisation and has been a leader in the world of optimisation, on various fronts. Owing to this, eCommerce will continue to lead the world of customer experience optimisation.

With more hygiene and health concerns around the world, a lot of the optimisation is going to focus on communicating this focus on health and hygiene and have logistical processes that balance hygiene and turn-around time.

eCommerce is going to further embrace server-side optimisation with an always-on strategy with personalisation across their stack, with newer and smaller companies picking them up too.

What common mistakes have you seen companies make or challenges you’ve seen them face in the field of optimisation?

The most common mistakes in the field of optimisation are typically the most critical and elementary ones. Optimisation is essentially experimentation-driven, and for an experiment to be effective, the right experiment strategy is crucial.

Many companies fail to make sure that each experiment is effectively designed. This means having the hypothesis clearly defined, goals clearly identified and tracked, and not deviating from the objective and process set out.

Another very common mistake is designing experiments on avenues where the sample size becomes too small, and then determining the results based only on significance. While significance is definitely a robust and sound statistic, business decisions are based on much more than statistical significance.

How is VWO preparing to stay ahead of the game in the optimisation landscape?

VWO is adding capabilities to do end-to-end testing, covering both front-end and back-end development. This will help businesses optimise their entire experience, on and off the website too.

VWO also intends to use AI much more, starting with content recommendations. We also plan to launch automated/always-on testing. Events-based architecture is also in the works, which will enable users to do deeper and more nuanced testing.

We are also building more integrations to be able to pull and push data into tools our customers most frequently use.

Watch the PSY-Q webinar Endless Gain and VWO conducted together:

This is the third of a series of posts where we speak with leading customer experience optimisation companies on trends and the future of digital growth. Check out the previous conversations with SessionCam and Fresh Relevance here.

Stay tuned for the next one!

[1] Growth Mindset Merchants, Mollie 2020

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