With an increasing number of companies choosing to opt for the right conversion rate optimization (CRO) solutions, this partnership is positioned to elevate the CRO and experimentation arena in the Japanese market. 

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VWO’s robust experimentation platform and award-winning customer support combined with Gaprise’s expertise in digital marketing technology and ever-widening global network of technology vendors will help fast-growing companies in Japan expand their CRO avenues through experimentation. 

With this partnership, Gaprise takes a giant leap forward towards its vision to scour the best technology solutions from around the world and in turn offer greater value to its customers. The company aims to uplift the digital marketing environment in Japan by helping clients get the most out of their experimentation roadmap through VWO, and in the process, grow their business.  

“We’ve partnered with VWO considering their flexible pricing structure that Japanese customers can choose from, and also as the platform supports native Japanese – again something that hugely benefits the market. As a solution partner offering consultancy services, we are sure this partnership will help our clients strengthen their CRO activities and accelerate their digital growth.”, says Keiji Doi, Chief Operating Officer, Gaprise.  

With over a decade of experience, Gaprise has a unique foothold in Japan through its strong alliances with hyper-growth startups like Monday.com, Yotpo, and ContentSquare, among others. 

For VWO, this partnership strengthens its position as a leading A/B testing solutions provider in the Asia-Pacific region. With a product suite that caters to every requirement of effective experimentation – from visitor behavior insights to validating the CRO roadmap through testing – the company is strategically placed to add further impetus to the growing CRO market in Japan. 

“We’re very excited to have Gaprise join our growing partner network. This partnership strengthens our commitment to enable Japanese brands to build delightful digital experiences. We’re optimistic that our easy and intuitive experimentation platform combined with Gaprise’s consulting expertise will go a long way in creating a significant impact on clients’ businesses through well-suited optimization strategies.”, says Sparsh Gupta, Co-founder & CEO, Wingify (makers of VWO).

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About Gaprise

Gaprise is a company that supports digital business, with a focus on digital marketing. We search the world, and especially Israel, for ground-breaking and valuable technology solutions, and present our discoveries to markets and our client companies. Many of the technologies we handle have functions that enable deeper analysis than is possible with the technologies of our Japanese competitors or have functions that are unique and already becoming the global world standard but have yet to gain major recognition in Japan. With our eye on the markets of the future, we commenced sales activities in 2012.
As a result of many growing companies incorporating these technologies into their businesses, we have also contributed – albeit in a modest way – to the conception and creation of new markets. Furthermore, with partners that are publicly listed companies – such as monday.com and Riskified – or that have grown into mega-businesses by successfully procuring capital in the order of several hundred million dollars – such as Contentsquare and Yotpo – Gaprise is demonstrating increasingly stronger leadership in a diverse range of markets.

About VWO

VWO helps more than 2500 brands like Domino’s, HBO, eBay, and Disney create and deliver digital experiences loved by their customers. It is a connected platform that offers insights into visitor behavior, planning, and A/B testing capabilities, and easy deployment of changes – all within the same environment – to empower businesses to improve conversions across the entire customer journey. Conversion rate optimization experts in more than 90 countries trust VWO to perform data-driven A/B testing on their products and apps. 

VWO has been partners with Endless Gain, a multi-award-winning optimization agency in the UK, for over 5 years now. Endless Gain is a pioneer in bringing biometric user research and a consumer psychology-based approach to conversion rate optimization. By combining biometrics and psychology, they have developed an unrivaled method for creating, optimizing, and personalizing customer experiences to increase revenue for their clients.

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We speak with Endless Gain CEO Neil McKay about his views on optimization and partnerships.

Tell us about Endless Gain.

Endless Gain is a conversion optimization agency and our focus is to help our clients improve the buying experience for their customers. By doing so, more people are likely to buy from our clients’ websites, leading to higher sales and revenue for them and better website experience for their customers. As a result, everybody wins.

Why customer experience optimization? How did that become the focus of the company?

My previous company was a digital marketing agency, and we saw a lot of revenue being spent to drive traffic to websites. But often, when that traffic got to the website, we didn’t know how that traffic performed. And more and more clients were asking us what’s happening with all that traffic. All transactions and conversions were attributed to the source—PPC, for example—but it wasn’t as straightforward as that. A lot of other things were happening on the website that influences customers’ buying decisions positively and negatively, and these were not being considered when measuring the success of the activity.

I really believed that by creating a business that focused purely on optimizing what happens on a client website, we’d be able to help the clients increase the return on investments from all marketing and retention channels. This way, we would be helping businesses become more self-reliant as opposed to dependent on third-party channels and solutions.

I spent over 12 months researching the sector before we eventually launched in January 2016.

You refer to yourselves as strategic partners. What is your approach to partnership?

Anybody can optimize a website. A business can do it themselves in-house if they want to. Our role is to work closely with the brands to understand exactly what their strategic goals are, and we gear our optimization towards that.

Optimizing a client’s website can involve several things: doing research, implementing JDIs based on the research, creating hypotheses, designs, coding experiments, running them and analyzing them, and constantly looking to find new opportunities to improve the customer’s experience.

Often, in optimization, when running experiments, the focus is on exploiting what already exists. But there are also areas where we explore new opportunities, to see if there is a new market or a possibility of reshaping the way things are done. And we do that for all our clients. By exploring new ways of doing things, we’ve been able to make things better, which have been game-changers for not only our clients but also for their sector.

And how long have you been in partnership with VWO?

We’ve been in partnership with VWO since the business set up. In fact, I was working with VWO before that when I spent a year beta-testing the business. I worked with Harinder Singh and both he and VWO have always been very helpful and supportive throughout our business’ various stages of growth.  

So what makes Endless Gain a good fit for clients?

We might not be the right fit for everybody, but we are the right fit for brands who have a high volume of transactions going through the website, brands who are looking to grow aggressively, who want to extend their team through partnering with an agency like us. Optimization should also be within their company’s culture.

What was the most important lesson you learnt during the growth of Endless Gain?

The more you know, the less you know. The more you optimize, the more you realize that there is still so much to learn about optimization.

While optimization is very much based on science and there are hard and fast rules, there’s also a lot of flexibility. There are many ways to get the desired outcome. It’s about finding a methodology and process that works the best for you.

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What are the typical optimization challenges clients face?

One of the most common things we see is that clients know they’ve got a problem on their website, but they just don’t have the time to improve it. As a result, they fall further and further behind on achieving their strategic goals. We allow clients the opportunity to carry on with their primary and most important roles (trading) while we optimize their website for them.

When we optimize a client’s website, we don’t just stop at that. We take those learnings and stretch them across the client’s ecosystem. So, for example, if we see a particular pattern in customer behavior and we’re able to improve it on the website, we look at how we can take that experience on to their app, email marketing, catalogs, TV campaigns, etc. We look at how far we can stretch that experience within the client’s ecosystem to create a better CX.

So how often can one iterate on the same page or experience?

You can iterate on the same page as many times as you like, but commercially we’d suggest you stop when you see diminishing returns. Until running experiments on a page is no longer bringing you the returns that you would require.

And even then, there still may be more to squeeze from the page. Have you reached the local maxima? Conduct more research and see if there are new insights. Consider if it’s time to shift from exploiting to exploring.

What do you expect from a typical optimization solution?

We did an in-depth market study on 100 experimentation and personalization platforms earlier this year, which gave us an opportunity to look at different kinds of optimization solutions in the market.

Based on that, plus our company’s experience with different platforms, I would say a good optimization platform should allow scalability, straightforward experimentation, the ability to process and inject data from the client’s databases, personalization, and AI, and integration with the website’s analytics platform, along with a clear roadmap of feature updates created through customer feedback.

A good optimization solution should also have great customer service for agency partners and clients and quick response and support when things go wrong.

What have you learned about client servicing and continuity over the years?

Business is about relationships. Things are not always going to go well, but if you have good relationships with your partners and clients, you can get through the challenging times together and shore each other up. But if you haven’t maintained a relationship, it’s unlikely you will be able to work together long-term.

So, communicate like crazy with your clients, your partners, your internal teams… explain, discuss, and debate if required. But always communicate and maintain positive relationships.

Any advice you’d like to give to optimizers and e-commerce businesses in this changing landscape?

Optimization has never been more important than it is now. Because of the shift in the landscape, more activities are and will be taking place online. Consumer behavior has changed and is changing. Research your customers, your sector, understand the changes in your customers’ behavior and adapt your offerings to their needs accordingly.

If you haven’t already, start your optimization journey. And if you’re already optimizing, focus on how you can do it better and faster to give your customers an experience that turns them into fans of your brand. 

Kula Partners is one such agency that has actively practiced and advocated a structured CRO program. This story aims to highlight the optimization process followed by Kula Partners and how VWO helped it achieve success at each step of the process.

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Based out of Nova Scotia, Canada, Kula Partners is a certified partner with VWO, offering services such as conversion optimization, inbound marketing, and web development. While optimizing conversions for its clients, Jeff White, Principal at Kula Partners, discovered that following a rigorous optimization process is what leads to success.

Synopsis of Kula’s Way of Optimizing for Success

The optimization process at Kula begins with identifying optimization opportunities on a client’s website or landing pages. It is done by closely analyzing website data and user behavior, using a variety of tools. Next, it hypothesizes ways to capitalize on each optimization opportunity. Hypotheses are then prioritized based on a few factors such as potential of improvement and effort in implementation. The hypotheses undergo A/B tests for validation, per its priority list. The results of A/B tests are thoroughly examined, and the learning is documented in a common knowledge repository. This repository is used to generate more hypotheses to optimize the website further. The cycle continues.

 

As Jeff puts it, “Optimizing a client’s site for conversion always starts for us with listening. We begin by implementing VWO heatmaps, clickmaps, and visitor recordings to see how people are using a site. Combined with analytics from tools such as Google Analytics and HubSpot, we’ll look for the pages that have the biggest opportunities for conversion optimization based on total number of visits and current conversion rates. Once we have a good understanding of how people are using those pages, we’ll implement a series of tests to see how best to improve the conversion rate. Sometimes this takes the form of simple changes to the body copy, button position and format. In other cases, it may mean making much larger bets and designing a wholly different, alternative landing page.

After we’ve an opportunity to implement revisions on a client site, we’ll continue to monitor the results to see how site visitors interact and refine the interface to improve the user experience even further.”

Since 2014, Kula has been trusting VWO for its optimization strategy. It has been using new features as they come up to achieve better conversions for its client websites.

Step-by-Step Process-Oriented Approach to Conversion Optimization

Let’s talk about how Kula puts its well-defined process into practice.

Step1: Identifying Optimization Opportunities

The first step in optimizing a website for more conversions is to establish baselines. This means setting up key metrics or goals that clearly indicate visitor actions and conducting quantitative analysis around these goals. Visitor actions leading to completion of a final goal (such as Checkout in case of eCommerce) are tracked as funnels. The website conversion funnel is extremely effective in spotting leaks—pages from which most users drop off.

Kula uses robust tools such as Google Analytics and HubSpot to track key metrics and discover potential leaks. These tools also point to high-value pages on a website—the pages that attract the highest traffic and the pages that contribute to many conversions.

Jeff says, “We identify opportunities for testing through a number of ways. We establish website funnels in tools such as HubSpot, Google Analytics and MixPanel. We then monitor conversion rates across the funnel to see areas that may be ripe for improvement. “

Step 2: Analyzing Visitor Behavior

After identifying potential leaks, the next step is to analyze how visitors are interacting with these pages on the website. This calls for a qualitative analysis of how visitors behave on the website. Such analysis provides significant insights about why visitors are behaving in a certain way. For example, if a lot of visitors are abandoning sessions on a eCommerce home page, a heatmap or visitor recording can be used to find out what category of products they were looking for and what specific problems they faced while searching for the product. Knowing what deters users from completing a conversion step is an opportunity for optimization.

At Kula, the team takes help of VWO capabilities such as Heatmaps, Scrollmaps, Visitor Recordings, and Form Analysis to understand the usage habits of visitors. It also uses VWO On-page Surveys to directly ask visitors for feedback.
Jeff shares, “As stated above, we always start our tests by observing the present usage habits of site visitors through heatmaps, clickmaps, and visitor recordings. If it makes sense, we may also gather subjective data through exit surveys. Once we have found where users stumble, we formulate specific tests to try to improve conversion.”

Here’s how Kula analyzed visitor behaviors for their clients, using VWO’s advanced capabilities:

Using Heatmaps to Improve Traffic Flow

Kula Partners was working on optimizing the Halifax International Airport Authority (HIAA) website by highlighting information for airport visitors at the forefront: arrivals and departures, parking information, and directions. Although the new website saw major traffic increase (more than 300%), the team continued to scout for more optimization opportunities.

A heatmap report of the HIAA home page revealed interesting insights—68% of all clicks on the home page were on the Departures tab and only 6% clicked back to the Arrivals tab.

Kula realized that this made perfect sense. Most of the traffic on the website home page would be coming to check when their flight is scheduled to depart. Far less people would look at the arrivals; they would do that only before receiving someone at the airport.

Based on this insight, Kula decided to make Departures as the default view on the home page. As a result, it saw a 20% drop in the number of visitors that clicked the other tab, which was Arrivals in this case.

Using Website Surveys Directly Provides Insights from Actual Visitors

This time, Kula was optimizing the website of Tirecraft—a company providing superior tires, wheels, accessories, and automotive services. The objective, in this case, was to increase the number of quotes users submit on the website.

To do that, it first tried to understand what prevented visitors from submitting a quote. It went ahead with a website survey and asked the website visitors, “What stopped you from submitting a quote request today?”

Visitors could choose their answers from the following options:

• I prefer to purchase this product in person.
• There was no pricing information available.
• I need more information.
• I can’t buy the product I want online.
• Other.

The result of the survey highlighted the major pain points that users faced.

An overwhelming number of visitors responded with the second option “There was no pricing information available.”

Using Visitor Recordings to Optimize User Experience

Jeff shared an example of how Kula is using visitor recordings to help its clients.

“We recently completed a large UX analysis project with a series of visitor recordings for a luxury extended-stay apartment company with a national presence in Canada. Through this process, we’ve been able to develop a series of over 100 recommendations for improvement of the user experience. Our plan is to begin a series of extensive innovative A/B tests, starting with their product pages and moving to other areas of the site from there.”

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Step 3: Planning and Prioritizing Testing Hypotheses

The insights and observations collected from quantitative and qualitative analyses act as fuel for the optimization engine. Our next key task is to manage this library of insights and build hypotheses for testing based on data insights.

A typical hypothesis statement looks like: Based on the observation that visitors are abandoning cart because they can’t find security seals on the checkout page, I expect that adding security seals on the checkout page will address the trust issues for visitors not completing the purchase.

There is a hypothesis aimed at addressing each optimization opportunity. Just as a thorough website analysis brings up multiple optimization opportunities, the hypotheses are also numerous. At most instances, it is not possible to validate all these hypotheses through A/B tests simultaneously. At that point, the hypotheses are prioritized on factors, including the potential to deliver positive results and ease of implementation. Prioritizing these hypotheses helps us pinpoint which tests to run first and which ones to park for future.

Kula also follows a similar prioritization model. Jeff adds, “Although we don’t specifically follow any single prioritization framework, our process most closely aligns with the PIE framework. As an agency with considerable dev chops, we’re lucky in that we can implement nearly any level of test no matter how complex. The question at that point is whether or not there’s enough potential lift in conversion to make the adjustment worthwhile.”

The prioritization is usually implemented with the help of project management tools.

“We record and detail our hypotheses for client tests using our project management tool, JIRA. We also maintain detailed notes about how to conduct tests and implement them in VWO, using Confluence, so that all Kula team members can quickly reference the correct processes.” explains Jeff.

Step 4: Validating Hypotheses with Testing

After the hypotheses are created and prioritized, it is time to test them. Testing a hypothesis helps you validate your thought process, and a winner assures the percentage of gain you’ll achieve by executing the change on the website. Based on the complexity of the change to be implemented, you should choose the type of test to run. For instance, it makes more sense to experiment with multivariate tests on websites with heavy traffic than on pages with low traffic.

Jeff talks about his experience with testing while he was working with rest of the team on creating a new version of the website to match the new positioning.

“We rolled out a version of the new layout for our HubSpot landing pages four months before we began designing the full site. The result was pretty solid—on our most popular asset landing page, we saw a conversion lift of nearly 10%. This gave us the confidence to deploy the design more widely.

Here is a screenshot of the test variations with the old version on the left and the new one on the right:”

Step 5: Analyzing Test Results and Documenting the Learning

The last leg of the optimization journey focuses on analyzing how the test results tie to visitor behavior and on saving learning from this analysis for future optimization.

Jeff explains, “When running tests, we review the results from VWO but also look at how GA and HubSpot are reporting on the changes in conversion or traffic behavior. We definitely document our results from previous tests in order to inform our future tests. These are also used in our presentations to clients on why/how we should implement CRO for their businesses.”

Key Takeaways

1. A process-driven strategy for optimizing conversions is the key to long-term success.
2. To run the optimization engine for long-term growth, businesses need to adopt a structured approach that generates insights and learning that to act as fuel for this engine.
3. The optimization process begins with first putting the baselines in place and finding areas of potential leaks. Next comes an in-depth view of how the visitors are behaving, that is, qualitative research. This is followed by recording and prioritizing hypotheses, which are validated through structured A/B testing.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

To cut out the technical details, the change we did today means that the load time due to VWO will be drastically reduced as now the code that is needed to run a test is downloaded much faster (our benchmarks and early feedback suggest it is at least 2x-10x faster). Following are some FAQs related to this change.

Basic question: what do I need to do if I am currently running tests?

You simply need to update VWO Smartcode snippet to the latest one in order to enjoy faster loading tests.

Techie question: why don’t you have a nice URL for JavaScript file? Don’t you know about CNAMEs?

Yes, we are aware of it and desparately wanted to use a URL “cdn.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/vis_opt.js” however CloudFront doesn’t yet support custom SSL certificates.
That is, sites accessing “https://cdn.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/vis_opt.js” would have thrown a certificate error which isn’t nice. We will update the code fragment with a nice URL as soon as Amazon starts supporting it.

Offbeat question: what if I want to host static JavaScript file myself?

First, it is not at all needed now as CloudFront will be faster than hosting the file yourself. Second, if you really want to host the file yourself, please go ahead and do it. Though make sure you keep up to the latest version as we regularly do minor (unannounced) bug fixes. However, whenever there is a major change we definitely announce it on blog and newsletter.

Philosophical question: what’s the answer to life?

Forty Two

UPDATE:

To fully convince you how fast VWO has become, here are some load time metrics from different locations across the world (thanks to WatchMouse).

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Load time of previously S3 hosted code snippet (observe that average total load time is about 700-1000 milliseconds).

Load time of new CloudFront hosted code snippet (observe that the average total load time has come down to 50-70 milliseconds – a whopping 10x speed improvement).