Wingify acquires Concept Feedback so your website can stand on the shoulders of giants

Wingify, maker of Visual Website Optimizer, a conversion rate optimization (CRO) tool that helps its clients improve sales and lead generation via their websites, has announced (exclusively to VentureBeat) that it has acquired Concept Feedback today for an undisclosed sum.

Concept Feedback, according to their website, is a 27,000-strong community of web design and user experience experts.

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Unlike many other solutions in the CRO space, which focus on the technical aspects of testing, measuring, and choosing the highest performing option as the live design, Wingify’s VWO takes an altogether more holistic approach. This acquisition further augments the feedback loop.

“A/B split testing is a significant part of the CRO story, of course,” Paras Chopra, CEO of Wingify, told me via phone, “but it doesn’t provide users with a full picture, and it doesn’t help them test the right things.”

CRO solutions are certainly becoming more popular, especially in B2C companies as businesses look to leverage any possible competitive advantage.

A recent survey from TrustRadius shows that the CRO marketplace is on the rise, but the same report also suggested that no one vendor can currently provide everything customers need.

As a result, many organizations are using two or more CRO solutions, combining the results before acting upon them. In addition, most solutions are purely technical in nature; something Chopra is railing against with VWO.

“You can’t just let the customers who are A/B testing for the first time manage a project without assistance,” Chopra said. “It is as if you’re saying ‘here you go; do whatever you think is right’. In reality, those customers will end up testing the low-hanging fruit, such as call-to-action button colors and changes to sidebar positions.”

So what does VWO do differently, and why is the acquisition of Concept Feedback important to Wingify and its products?

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“Within VWO we already had our Idea Factory,” Chopra said. “Before starting out on any CRO project, you can search the Idea Factory and determine what tests may work best for you.”

For example, if your company is in the SaaS industry, you might look at VWO’s Idea Factory to determine five ideas on how to improve your website click-through rate.

Once you have your tactics and plan, the technology steps in, but A/B split testing is only one part of the story.

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“In addition to the usual testing technologies, we also include heat maps to show you where people are clicking on your website,” Chopra said.

While many businesses are currently using CRO tools with similar features — sometimes in one product or, as the TrustRadius survey discovered, within a suite of solutions — VWO takes design tests, copy changes, and heat map technologies and combines them into a single solution. But the real “secret sauce” isn’t in the software elements of Wingify’s CRO product.

“In addition to the technical elements, we ask a panel of users — sourced via MTurk — qualitative questions such as “What would you improve about our homepage’,” Chopra said.

“Now, with our acquisition of Concept Feedback, we’ve strengthened our offering at the other end of the spectrum; the opinions of web design and UX experts,” Chopra said. “Concept Feedback has a community of thousands of designers, and our customers can now ask them for feedback on their CRO projects.”

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The combination of knowledge, technology, user feedback, and expert advice provides a full 360-degree view of the CRO process.

“For Wingify, it means we can provide full quantitative feedback — allowing customers to look at their analytics, understand their sales funnels, and determine their real conversion rates — in order to discover where their users are abandoning the buying process and where they are continuing on the journey to the purchase,” Chopra said.

“Then, the customer can also gain complete qualitative feedback, getting real advice on what is working and what doesn’t do so well,” Chopra said.

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I wondered if you have to use the panels provided by Wingify or whether the tool allows for custom audiences and segmentation.

“You can ask your users, ask a random set of users, segment the audience and even A/B split test users, designers and experts,” Chopra said. “You may discover that one segment, who access the site using a mobile device on weekends, are getting a great experience, but that people using it on the desktop during working hours aren’t converting.”

Wingify’s VWO, along with the addition of Concept Feedback, has yet to show whether it could be the one CRO solution that provides everything customers need from this kind of marketing technology, but it is certainly one of the most complete, holistic solutions I’ve seen in the space.

A CRO platform, if you will, rather than a straight A/B testing tool.

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What’s the one piece of advice Chopra offers for people new to the world of CRO and split testing?

“Do one test per week; get one set of results every week. That is where you’ll become successful with CRO. Try to do more than that, or perform multiple tests at the same time, and it is too easy to miss what is making a difference to your conversion rates,” Chopra said.