3 key ways Optimizely and FullStory are better together

Experimentation is an essential part of any company’s digital experience strategy. Optimizely is the world’s leading experimentation platform, empowering marketing and product teams to test, learn and deploy winning digital experiences. By running experiments and measuring the impact of new features, campaigns and content with real users in production, teams can ensure they deliver valuable new digital experiences more quickly and with less risk.  

It can be challenging, however, to know which experiments you should prioritize in order to drive the most impactful improvements to the customer experience and digital conversions. And, once you’ve run an experiment, it’s not always obvious why a certain test variation performed differently with users than the others.   

FullStory‘s digital experience analytics platform helps inform these decisions by automatically indexing every customer interaction with your site or app and delivering actionable insights to improve the customer journey with session replays and intelligent heatmaps.  

Our latest Digital Labs Event featured FullStory and joint customers, Zillow Group and The Financial Times, who demonstrated a few essential ways to create the ultimate customer experience using the powerful combination of FullStory and Optimizely.  

Here are three ways that make us better together:    

1. Discover real pain points in the digital customer journey to help prioritize your experiment 

FullStory provides the flexibility to build and define any customer funnel to track how users move through key actions towards a goal. With funnels, you can identify issues that are causing user drop-off, learn whether performance differs across unique customer cohorts or by dimensions like device or browser type, and measure the severity of impact of those problems. Review FullStory’s automatic alerts on frustration signals like Rage Clicks and Dead Clicks to see where visitors are getting stuck. Once you’ve defined and prioritized customer problems - backed by FullStory data - that you want to tackle, design and run experiments in Optimizely to validate which solutions best reduce those points of user friction.   

“Personally, I would just watch general sessions in FullStory to see how the whole thing was working. The things we’re able to catch and fix–the bugs, the confusion, the friction–I know this experience we’ve built wouldn’t exist today without FullStory.” - Julian Gaviria, Head of User Experience, Thomas  

2. Drive rapid iteration by combining experience analytics with always-on experimentation  

FullStory’s digital experience analytics platform provides you with key qualitative and quantitative insights across the customer journey so you can drive high-impact digital improvements. Utilize those insights to generate hypotheses, then use Optimizely to safely rollout new experiments across front-end customer touchpoints and backend logic and measure the impact to key metrics with A/B testing. You can see the performance differences of your test variations in Optimizely and use FullStory to see why their performance differed.    

“Optimizely allowed us to implement and iterate on elements at a very rapid pace. Through A/B testing, we could pin down the specific language and design treatments our users were reacting to, ultimately decreasing the amount of time it took buyers to find suppliers of critical PPE. We would not have been able to go as fast as we did without Optimizely.” - Julian Gaviria, Head of User Experience, Thomas 

3. Understand exactly how users interact with experiments and why variations perform differently. 

After launching your experiments in Optimizely, you can use FullStory to analyze exactly how your customers interact with the different variations of your tests. This will help you validate the results confirming why a winning variation outperformed another, but more importantly, help you learn from losing variations and iterate upon inconclusive experiments.   

Once you’ve added the FullStory snippet to your site, you can configure Optimizely to pass custom variables into FullStory that identify the experiment name and variant name for every visitor session. Once enabled, you’ll be able to easily segment visitors in FullStory based on the experiment and variation they were shown and view live playbacks of their interactions or click maps for insights about aggregated sessions. 

“FullStory is integrated with Optimizely, which allows us to see both the respective A/B test and variation that a user is bucketed into along with a link to a replay of the user’s session. With every test we ran, we would jump into FullStory to watch how users engaged with each variation. Being able to launch a test and immediately see how it’s working—whether users are behaving as we predicted—has helped us move extremely quickly. Within those two weeks, we probably ran more tests than we have in the past three months.”  - Julian Gaviria, Head of User Experience, Thomas