Vertster
Part 1: “What’s so good or different about Vertster?”—written by Scott Miller of Vertster
Vertster provides tools and services for optimizing website conversion rates and revenue. Customers benefit from our software by being able to run more tests, more frequently, and with less technical hassle than other options. Specifically, Vertster requires none of the following: Page Tagging, DNS changes, Subdomains, Installed software, or Changes to the URL of sites.
In addition, our tool is optimized for team use, and includes the ability to give additional logins to anyone, and control both what they can do, and what they can see, upon using the account.
Vertster offers three types of tests: A/B Testing, with unlimited combinations of variables and options; Multivariate Testing, and something we call Treadmill MVT. This is a continuous optimization algorithm for multivariable testing. Treadmill is similar to a traditional MVT, in that it considers multiple variables and multiple options simultaneously. What is different is that you can add or remove variables and options at any time—removing the need to go through an extensive design period before beginning the test.
For agencies, we offer white label and private label at no extra charge. In addition, our flexible templates mean agencies can upload custom CSS rules and completely change the look and feel of the back end to match their customer portals. Rounding out the software is a “free with account” REST API which currently allows data access, but will soon provide full read-write capability for creating and managing tests remotely.
To learn more…
…visit Vertster’s website—but don’t forget to check out the customer reviews first—see below.
Part 2: User ratings at a glance
To read reviews of Vertster, see below. This section contains the average ratings from all the reviews.
| Ease of use |   |
| Customer support |  |
| User guides, documentation, etc. | |
| Value for money | |
| How likely would you be to recommend this service? | |
Part 3: User Reviews
Add a Review
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[The following review was submitted via a survey, hence the formatting.]
Website revenue: More than $10 million per year. Visitors per month: 100,000–1 million. Started using it: March 2007. Chose it because: Vertster provides full telephone support for their testing platform. The way they use Taguchi testing (fractional factorial testing) allows for faster test iterations. We’ve gotten actionable test results with fewer clicks. This helps minimize the ROI drag of testing on the overall business. Date stopped using it: still using it.
What results did you get from it?: We were able to get a 50% lift in conversion rate for our primary PPC campaigns. In our case a conversion is setting up a trading account.
Full review: Thankfully, I don’t have any regrets about using the Vertster platform. So there were no gotcha! moments.
Going in, it offered a solid value for the price they charged compared to other fully-supported MVT platforms.
We also use Google Website Optimizer and it’s a terrific tool–and it’s free. That’s the only drawback to Vertster. You have to pay a monthly fee to use it. But since we were spending between $30k and $80k per week on our PPC campaigns, we needed support in case we ran into a snag with test results or test administration. So knowing we could get help –even just to confirm that every aspect of the test was running as planned–was critical for us.
The fact that Vertser’s test pages are 100% SEO safe was also a big plus. For starters, I didn’t want duplicate pages getting spidered and indexed.
One initial drawback was the price (even though they were lower than their competitoors), but that was before we started getting results and putting higher performing landing pages into play. The monthly investment became unimportant vs. the lift we were getting.
One thing I wanted was to see if Vertster could easily integrate with Google Analytics. And recently that capability has been added to their platform. Another key function–I should note that as soon as we started generating results, others on our team wanted to see the dashboard graphics and peek in on how things were going. It just isn’t “safe” to let multiple people click around inside of a fully live dashboard. Vertster provides separate log-in credentials and permissions for multiple team members. Really helpful and a huge relief for me.
I haven’t used this yet but there’s also a free API that lets you port Vertster test data into your own applications or spreadsheets for further analysis or presentation.
I’ve run 27 experiments so far on Vertster. Their graphical results posting is pretty darn good. At a glance you can see how your MVT test battery is performing so you don’t have to wade through any statistics to see what’s happening.
Overall, I like Google’s Website Optimizer and Vertster… but each for slightly different reasons. For small campaigns — especialy in PPC — Website Optimizer offers just about everything we’ve needed. Vertser, much like Google’s Website Optimizer, shields users from statistics overload. If you want to get into the guts of the orthogonal arrays powering Vertser, the info is all there but you really don’t need to get deep into it. It’s helpful if you have a basic foundation of knowledge on testing. But to use this software, you don’t need to be a statistics expert by any stretch of the imagination.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Far more important that having a statistical background: The most vital part of this whole conversion quest, for us, has been deciding which elements to test in the first place. No tool can compensate for a bad choice of test elements.
One issue we came up with during testing is whether we could track conversions across multiple domains. I was initially surprised that Vertster could handle this.
Customer Support: In the first few tests we had alot of questions–mostly getting used to how things run on the dashboard and the test setup. We had extremely responsive phone support from Vertster and they spent as much time with us as we needed. Vertster really shines when we’re running much larger campaigns and when multiple team members are involved. Speed to results is everything when the clicks are flowing fast and in big volume. That’s one of Vertster’s strengths–due in part to the fractional factorial test set-ups that they use. And Vertster does A/B splits as well. So we can throw quickie tests at it, too. And the test setups are very quick — just a small code drop on the test page and one on the conversion page.
For advertisers spending in the range of $50k per month in PPC, Vertser would be an excellent choice. The same applies to businesses operating with a total organic ranking value of $50,000 or more per month (the value of your organic rank put in PPC terms). Also, for agency work, you can private label Vertster’s platform and even the domain that’s serving data. So when clients log in to see test results, they see your company and logo. That part is pretty cool… even if you’re using it in-house..
This is a pretty crap tool. It’s so awkward to use, it feels like it was whacked together as a high school project. Also the speed of Vertster’s CDN is extremely slow outside the US and the page load times probably impacts UX.
The tagging makes things easy in some cases. For instance, if you have an expensive development team, all you need to do is tag once and you’re good to go.
Besides that, best to stick with GWO and run sequential AB tests than to waste time and money on Vertster.
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