Latest crowdsourced guide rates top A/B testing vendors for marketers
- 23 October, 2014 09:45
A new crowdsourced guide from US-based Trustradius has ranked the most popular A/B testing software platforms with marketing teams based on user recommendations, company size and adoption.
The latest report, which is based on 200 in-depth reviews with users of A/B testing tools, found the leading vendor platforms for enterprises with more than 500 employees were pure-play offerings from Monetate and Maxymiser, with average user ratings of 4.6 and 4.4 out of five, respectively.
Alongside its user ratings, Trustradius tracked adoption of A/B testing platforms among the top 10,000 enterprise websites, top 100,00 mid-size websites and the whole Internet for small business websites using Buildwith.com’s public data to determine the most popular platforms in use.
Sixty-five per cent of the enterprise customer base was found to be using Monetate, compared with 83 per cent using Maxymiser. Other strong performers in the enterprise category in terms of user ratings and adoption included Qubit, SiteSpect, and AB Tasty.
In contrast, while Optimizely and Adobe Target were commonly used platforms within enterprise-size companies (22 per cent and 79 per cent respectively), both received lower-than-average user recommendation rankings in the TrustRadius report.
The report insights are displayed in a ‘TrustMap’, or visual depiction of the products for each of the three categories based on two dimensions: The likelihood to recommend ratings by users; and adoption in that segment.
In the mid-size segment (51 to 500 employees), Optimizely led as the preferred platform with a user rating of 4.5, and was being used by 53 per cent of the 100,000 websites rated by TrustRadius. Other strong performers in this space but with smaller install bases were Maxymiser, AB Tasty and Monetate.
At the small end of town (50 or fewer employees), Unbounce, which aims exclusively at small businesses, and Visual Website Optimizer were the leading platforms with users ratings of 4.7 and 4.4, respectively. They were also among the most widely used in this segment.
Across all three segments, Google Content Experiments, a free tool offered by Google Analytics, ranked beneath all other platforms.
The Trustradius guide defines A/B or split testing, as the process of dividing Web traffic among multiple versions of a webpage, email, app or other marketing channel, and evaluating which variation performs best against a business objective or outcome.
According to report author and Trustradius research manager, Megan Headley, the existence of low-cost and easy-to-use tools has increased the practice of testing among marketers. She also pointed out many companies were using more than one testing tool.
“In general, companies are moving from having one A/B testing champion, to a team dedicated to testing, to a testing-based culture, where different business units across the organisation are involved in testing,” she noted.
The report also found 44 per cent of A/B testing software users are spending more than $10,000 per year on A/B testing software.
The A/B Testing buyer’s guide is the third such peer-based review guide launched by Trustradius. Earlier this year, the company launched a guide looking into the top marketing automation platforms based on user views and industry segment.
That guide found Oracle’s Eloqua to be the top choice for enterprises, Marketo in the mid-tier and Hubspot at the smaller end of town.
Trustradius also recently produced a buyer’s guide on digital analytics platforms, finding Adobe Analytics as the most widely used and popular platform among enterprises and mid-size companies. Top performers in small business, meanwhile, opted for StatCounter, Piwik and Google Analytics (free).
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