2015 Optie Award Winners

Learn from the best in the business of optimization

“I promote losers as much as winners, to make sure we learn from every single conclusive test.”

– Pauline Marol of Hotwire, Optimization Champion of the Year

Pauline Marol, Hotwire

Everyone at Hotwire knows Pauline Marol as the “optimization guru.” In the past year she’s energized the company’s optimization program and put together a strategic, dedicated A/B testing team.

Pauline has extended the importance of optimization in Hotwire’s culture beyond the testing team, and helped drive record results for two major domains.

The Optimization Champion of the Year

“By identifying that distinct channels performed differently, we were able to segment into single‐channel tracks and lift overall conversion rates.”– 99designs and CROmetrics, Most Impactful Use of

Personalization

99designs + CROmetrics

Through testing, CROmetrics found that 99designs’ customer expectations varied by inbound marketing channel.

The two set up a series of A/B tests to identify how different traffic sources were performing, and worked with the advertising team to understand which message and offer worked best for each channel, ultimately improving conversions.

Most Impactful Use of Personalization

“Product and brand managers in the organization now think, ‘We should test that.’”

– Scripps Network Interactive, Data-Driven Culture Award

Scripps Networks Interactive

With growing excitement around testing, many stakeholders at Scripps Networks Interactive wanted to rapidly run tests but weren’t aware of the analytics and best practices involved.

Data-Driven Culture Award

Scripps’ testing team successfully created streamlined procedures and a culture that understands the importance of a strategy driven by analytics, test prioritization, test plans and sampling requirements.

Markis Taylor, Trulia When evaluating trade‐offs in user behavior, it is critical to have accurate data on all behaviors at play. Trulia’s challenge came from managing ad impression and click data from many sources.

Markis Taylor, Trulia’s resident Optimizely expert, devised a solution to streamline this data to integrate with Optimizely, enabling them to make accurate and well-informed decisions about trade-offs in user behavior.

Developer Extraordinaire Award

“This was a big success for our mobile web platform and helped drastically improve the user experience.”

– Trulia Rentals, People’s Choice: Experience of the Year

Trulia Rentals + CROmetrics

The ‘People’s Choice’ award is voted on by the Optiverse community, who recognized Trulia as this year’s victor.

Trulia’s Infinite Scroll feature experience showed a 15% improvement in leads and dramatically improved the user experience. This mobile web test influenced the rest of the company to adopt features into other Trulia products.

People’s Choice: Experience of the Year

“This integration has put testing in the spotlight as an effective way to make data‐backed decisions at a data‐driven company.”

– Lauren Ford and Markis Taylor of Trulia, The Better Together Award

Lauren Ford + Markis Taylor, Trulia

Analysis of test results was a pain point at Trulia; the process was manual, time-consuming and inconsistent.

The Better Together Award

Lauren spearheaded the effort to integrate Optimizely with Omniture, enabling the collection of valuable insights into user behavior by test group. Markis was a key engineering resource for this implementation, and their efforts resulted in a more efficient and accurate method of analyzing test results.

Clearhead + RedEyeClearhead and RedEye have gone above and beyond in helping Optimizely shape the optimization landscape. Over the last several years, both partners have built meaningful relationships and driven incredible business value for joint clients, resulting in the highest joint client satisfaction scores from all of our partners.

Both Clearhead and RedEye give true meaning to the word ‘partner,’ with their vision for the future and expertise in the category of optimization.

Solutions Partner of the Year

“Knowing what variation ‘won’ is just a part of our success criteria. We also need to know how much revenue we will be able to make per variation.”

– eBay, Mobile Pioneer Award

eBayeBay has been optimizing its web experience for over a year and recently extended its testing program to include experiences delivered by its mobile app.

The team at eBay employs a systematic process for planning and prioritizing experiments based on their anticipated revenue impact. This process led them to execute an experiment on a critical component of their in-app experience, driving significant gains to purchases and their bottom line.

Mobile Pioneer Award

“We tested new designs, experiences and value propositions to yield major business impact.”

– Village Roadshow Theme Parks and Clearhead, Most Dramatic Business Impact

Village Roadshow Theme Parks + Clearhead

Village Roadshow Theme Parks faced poor conversion rates for its two main areas of park ticket purchases on the website.

By testing a cleaner, more simplified visual hierarchy, Clearhead helped enable customers to quickly browse options and choose the right ticket for them. As a result, conversion rates and revenue increased significantly.

Most Dramatic Business Impact