FREE TOOL: Better way to document experiments

  • 14 August 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 2 views
Kevin_Peters
Userlevel 1

I love Unbounce’s ability to build out A/B tests and quick iterate across multiple different pages and campaigns. However, the one thing that has always driven me nuts is that there is no good way to monitor and document those various experiments. Until now…

My company is a conversion rate optimization agency that works solely with nonprofits. A big part of our work is running and documenting A/B experiments for our clients as a means to learn what makes their donors give.

Several years back, we made the realization that saving our experiment results in Excel documents wasn’t an ideal way to showcase to our clients what we were learning. (shocking, I know).

Over the past several years, we have developed a tool that allows us to not only have a better way to document our experiments but also to remotely monitor their progress by pulling in data from multiple optimization tools (Optimizely, Google Optimize, Hubspot, Mailchimp, etc.) Well, with over 200 pages published on Unbounce, we decided it was time to bring that system into the fold too.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that we are not a software company. We created a tool (https://winstonknows.com/) as a means to help ourselves but came to realize it might be helpful to others too. And since we are not a software company, we have also made the decision that we are not going to charge for the tool. (What could be better than “free”?)

If anyone is interested, when you sign up, you’ll be able to connect your Unbounce account to your instance of Winston. It will then remotely monitor your landing page experiments once an hour. When you reach validity, you’ll be able to press a button on the Dashboard and automatically generate screenshots, record the conversion data, and add additional notes about the experiment. This will help you create a library of experiments so that you can continue to iterate and build on your past successes.

There are several other fun features (adding co-workers to your team, adding offline experiments manually, a weekly email summary, etc.) that I won’t go into here.

For those that do sign up, I’d simply ask that you let me know what you think. Like I mentioned, we built it for ourselves but are always on the look out for bugs or ways that we can make it better. Thanks!

3 replies

Kyle.C
Userlevel 5

Very interesting,

So basically this is a way to make notes in a pretty way to show that one page had a button that says “BLAH” and another variant had a button that says “YUP”. Then screenshots of the two pages along side the conversion stats?

I have set up an account and I’ll certainly let you know what I think.

Hristian
Userlevel 7
Badge +3

Hey @Kevin_Peters,

I’m happy to see companies building products and services on top of Unbounce but there are 3 BIG red flags with your product that make it a no go for any serious business using Unbounce.

  1. Design - I understand that this is a side project but the design screams 1999. There are plenty of themes and tools to make it look like it belongs in 2018. However, this is pretty minor compared to the next 2 red flags…

  2. No GDPR notice, Privacy Policy and/or Terms and Conditions - Even as a side project these are things that need to be in place. Period. My agency has dozens of clients with tens of millions monthly visitors and hundreds of thousands of leads per month. You expect me to hand that over without knowing anything about you, your business, your security, your liability, etc.

  3. Asking for Username & Password - Connected to point 2 above. As someone who works with the Unbounce API, I can understand that it has it’s limits but scraping is not the answer. You are essentially asking me to open myself and my agency to lawsuits from here to kingdom come.

I’m ready to overlook point 1 above but 2 & 3 are show stoppers.

Best,
Hristian

Hristian K. → experimentation-as-a-service → https://www.revise.agency/
Kevin_Peters
Userlevel 1

Hello @Hristian. Thanks for the feedback. The privacy and terms are an easy add and they are already on our main website so we can just get them transferred over. Thanks.

As for your third point, agree that scraping the website isn’t ideal but the API does not provide the functionality that we needed (and in several cases, it actually gives bad data). After waiting over two years for the API to be improved, we realized it probably wasn’t going to happen. So, given the choice of not having this functionality vs. entering the username and password, we opted to make our lives easier and implement the scraping option.

As a note, you are able to make a separate “Viewer” level user in Unbounce that would restrict access to everything but the data points needed for this system. Given the restrictions on this user, it provides the same level of information that a robust API should be able to provide.

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