How Google sunsetting Optimize is an opportunity for Indian tech startups

Early this year Google announced that Google Optimize will sunset in September of 2023. Google Optimize is a tool for A/B testing and user experience that online marketers are heavily dependent on.  

A/B testing is an important part of conversion rate optimization (CRO), which is a process of increasing the percentage of conversions from a website or a mobile app. CRO is an integral part of the digital marketing strategy.

According to various reports Google holds close to 60 per cent of the A/B testing market. 

With Google announcing the sunset clause, several players are gearing up to take its market share. One such company is Wingify a bootstrapped tech startup.

Since the announcement was made by Google, Wingify has seen demand for its product go up by 3-4x.

“As soon as the announcement came from Google we started to work on our strategy and within a day launched our offering called VMO. Like Google Optimise it has both free and paid versions,” explained Sparsh Gupta, CEO and co-founder of Wingify.

Wingify is a bootstrapped company in the CRO segment and has an annual revenue run rate of $30 million and has been a profitable business with an EBIDTA upwards of 30 per cent.

Wingify boasts a customer base of over 2,500 brands across 90-plus countries. Some of the brands include players like Decathlon, Chargebee, Agoda, Bosch, and ICICI Bank. Close to 50,000-60,000 use tools from Wingify.

The CRO market is set to grow anywhere between the CAGR of 8-12 per cent over the next five to eight years and take this market to a size of $2.5 billion to $4 billion.

 Some of the reasons for the growth of this market is the increase in preference for online shopping along with the adoption of AI & deep learning. Secondly, the population of developing economies is the major factor that drives the conversion rate optimization software market growth. 

When it comes to market share, North America leads the CRO market with over 40 per cent share and will be around $1.3 billion by the end of 2023. Europe also plays an essential part in the global market being the 2nd largest region for CRO software. The Asia-Pacific region is expected to observe significant growth in the market owing to the presence of developing countries such as India, China, South Korea, and others.

This is evident in Wingify’s revenue category too. Gupta shares that the US is the largest market for the company followed by Europe and APAC which includes India and contributes 10-12 per cent of the revenue.

According to Gupta the CRO market and within it A/B testing has seen a boom in the recent past as more and more decisions are taken based on data. “With Indian companies focusing on digitisation the optimisation market has seen tremendous growth here too. At least for this year, we expect APAC to be one of the highest-growing markets,” added Gupta.

So to capture the market that Google leaves, Wingify has launched two categories of its A/B testing tool, one is a free version and the other is a paid version. “While the free version has seen a greater spike, the paid version conversion has gone up by 2x since Google announced its sunset decision,” he added.

Wingify is an apt example of how Indian-made products on a Software-as-a-services (SaaS) model have managed to take on global products.

Another such example is Zoho Books, the online accounting platform from SaaS behemoth Zoho. When Intuit announced that it is discontinuing its product Quickbooks from the Indian market, Zoho Books was quickly able to capture market share.

Zoho Books is the company's GST-compliant cloud accounting software, and also present in 13 country-specific tax editions. 

So far cloud-based accounting systems were popular with the SME segment, but Sivaramakrishnan Iswaran, global head, Zoho Finance, and Operation Suite in an earlier interaction with Business Standard points out that many enterprises are also approaching the company for Zoho Books. “One of the features we in-built with our suite is interoperability. One of the reasons why enterprises are approaching is because now they can integrate account receivables and collections and other accounting and finance features into their SAP or other software,” he explained.