VWO Acquires Navilytics to Offer Visitor Behavior Analysis Capabilities

We’re very happy to announce that VWO has acquired Navilytics – the proven visitor analytics solution with prominent customers such as Atlassian, Aerospike and SingleCare. With this acquisition and our recent announcement of On-page Surveys, we’ve moved further along into VWO’s transformation from the first “no-coding required” A/B testing tool in 2010 to the first full-featured experimentation platform that you will see in early 2016.

Why We Acquired Navilytics

VWO integrated heatmaps with A/B testing back in 2011. Since then, marketers, and the industry, have evolved to understand that A/B testing on its own is extremely tactical. What gets real, long-lasting results is a well-defined process of continuous research, hypothesis creation, testing and detailed analysis. Recognizing this need, we realize that VWO as a product has to help businesses run the entire optimization life-cycle from a single platform, instead of depending on multiple decoupled tools and then stitching the results together.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

The acquisition of Navilytics is our second step towards assembling that platform. A few weeks ago, we launched On-page Surveys, which enables our customers to ask relevant questions to visitors on their website. Navilytics adds capabilities of heatmaps (upgraded), clickmaps, scrollmaps, visitor session recordings and form analysis all in one powerful package.

These new features will allow marketers to walk in the shoes of their customers with far greater clarity. For example, you can now see how a particular visitor browsed your website, what path they took, how much they scrolled, where they clicked and in what sequence they consumed content on your page, and then trigger a survey based on their behavior asking why they did or did not take a particular action.

A little bit of back-story

As we were exploring building these capabilities internally, Conner, the sole founder of Navilytics approached us for a partnership discussion. He caught our attention as VWO is also a bootstrapped product and we have a special liking for smart people solving big problems on their own.

On digging deeper, Navilytics really excited us: Conner had been able to build it into a powerful product with all the features that we were planning to build. Finally, what began as partnership talks ended up being an acquisition.

Our vision – to build the most comprehensive experimentation platform

As most marketers and CRO practitioners know, A/B testing is a small (but important) activity when it comes to optimizing conversions and revenue. Most of the actual effort and time goes into understanding users – what they do, what they want and what a business can offer them that they’ll want to buy. Going to different tools and trying to make sense of the data from different angles is frustrating. VWO’s vision is to be able to integrate all the tools needed for CRO – heatmaps, visitor recordings, usability analysis, expert feedback, surveys, A/B testing, personalization – into one solid platform and provide a thoughtful process on top of it that even beginners can use without getting overwhelmed.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

What’s Next?

You will see many of the Navilytics features ported into VWO and continue to live and expand there. So expect many more feature announcements in future.

In fact, all of the Navilytics muscle has been improved upon and clubbed under one functionality that we call Visual Behavior Analysis (VBA). Click on the link to know more about it.

Beginning now, we’ve made available visitor recordings, form analysis and element list.

FAQs

I’m concerned about privacy implications of visitor recordings feature. What are you doing about it?

We don’t collect visitor behavior data until the respective features (heatmaps, clickmaps or visitor recordings) are switched on in your account and/or for specific campaigns. So if you don’t use it, VWO doesn’t collect data without your permission.

Visitor recordings is cool – but will it also record email addresses, credit card numbers, passwords, etc?

No. You can choose to exclude certain fields/inputs on your website from getting recorded.

Here’s a knowledgebase article to tell you more about it.

Whom do I contact if I have any concerns?

Reach out to [email protected]. We will be happy to assist you with your queries.