How to get the most out of CallRail’s VWO integration

by

David Schroeder
February 13, 2018

What is VWO?

Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) is an online software used to A/B test different versions of webpages for effectiveness in achieving specific results. For example, if you wanted to know whether your website would convert more visitors into customers by changing the main headline on the homepage. VWO would allow you to easily set up an A/B test, track the results, and determine a winner.

Check out all of CallRail’s official pre-built integrations, with apps like Salesforce, Google Ads, Marketo, and more.

How does the CallRail VWO integration work?

Improving conversion rates not only delivers more customers to your business, it can also reduce customer acquisition costs and help marketers understand their audiences better. However, the power of experimentation is often unavailable to businesses and organizations that drive customers through non-digital channels, like phone calls.

CallRail and VWO together solves that problem. CallRail has partnered with VWO to provide an integration to users that allows us to determine what content variations on a website or mobile app drive the most phone calls and text messages.

For VWO Pro Plan users, establishing the API integration is simply a matter of sending the authorization request from the CallRail Settings and Integrations interface. Once complete, all of your tests in VWO will automatically include two additional goals for Phone Calls and SMS. Accessing this data is as simple as examining the Detailed Report for any experiment and selecting the appropriate Goal.

Additionally, data from VWO is pushed to the CallRail app, allowing you and your team to see which website content variation a caller saw before dialing your business within CallRail’s Lead Center interface.

How do CallRail clients use VWO?

When Smartsearch Marketing used CallRail and VWO together, they found it was one of the best ways to see which tests drove the most calls and the best leads:

“The CallRail integration with VWO was an effective way for us to test and improve against goals that were previously impossible for us to optimize towards, namely generating more phone calls.”

Optimization and experimentation are ongoing processes, not just one-time events. You can run tests on copy, images, layout, site functionality, and more. Here are a few more unique use cases that will give you insight into improving your marketing and your bottom-line:

  • Customer service – Understanding how website users prefer to interact with Support teams, whether by Live Chat or Phone, is critical information for Operations, Support and resource allocation. Testing on-page content with a VWO experiment & CallRail integration not only provides insight into that question, but also creates an opportunity to lead users toward the more cost-effective option.
  • Paid traffic – Create unique landing pages with tailored content that matches the copy from your Google Ads (formally Adwords) or other advertisements. If your principal Call-To-Action (CTA) is motivating users to call your business, VWO & CallRail will make it clear which landing pages will give you the most bang for your advertising buck.
  • Website redesign – While website redesign is often based on a designer’s intuition and a client’s preference, A/B testing preliminary designs will give you clear feedback on which options will lead to the highest number of phone calls for your business. This invaluable insight will ensure that your team isn’t going down the wrong road while moving in a new direction.

Read more about A/B testing and CallRail here.

How does CallRail use the VWO Integration?

VWO A/B test of CallRail

CallRail uses VWO to run content experiments and improve our conversion rates, and we have found VWO to be a powerful but easy-to-use platform that allows you to run A/B, multivariate and split-URL tests on your website. We can change content like copy and images through the simple visual editor or dig deeper to make more profound changes through the code editor, giving us that balance between more high-powered development-driven tests and agile, quick changes.

Another interesting note about the VWO platform, unlike some other optimization and testing platforms, is that it includes user and UX research tools like heatmaps, recordings, and surveys directly into their interface, eliminating the need for other tools.

We recently ran an experiment on our Homepage to determine the effect of removing the Request a Demo button from our above-the-fold experience. Users could still request a demo from the Pricing page, but the hypothesis of our test was that by narrowing the available options on our Homepage, more users would flow into the funnel.

Unsurprisingly, the variation outperformed the control by driving more traffic to the Pricing page and decreasing the number of demo requests. However, in order to determine the true impact of the test, we needed to run downstream conversion calculations including both Free Trial Signups and Request Demo submissions.

If we were going to really grasp the holistic effect of the test, we needed to understand whether we were missing out on users that wanted a demo and nothing else. Thanks to the CallRail integration, we could easily see if there had been a difference in the number of calls from the Variation over the Control. This would prove to be a critical piece of information in determining the true winner of the result.

Ultimately, the result of the test was mixed. While the Variation outperformed the Control along two of three key metrics, the total number of downstream customers was nearly identical. This gave us crucial insight not only into the performance of the content, but also into the thinking, intentions and motivations of our potential customers – a result that we will extrapolate to all of our future marketing initiatives.

Bringing the capability of experimentation to the offline world is a powerful way to generate new value for your business and clients. CallRail and VWO together can solve the problem of non-digital measurement in testing and can lead to increases in the number of phone calls your website or mobile app is driving to your business.

For more information on CallRail’s VWO integration and the setup process, you can see our support article on VWO.