Words Matter: How Changing One Word on Our Site Increased Conversion by 10%

About three months ago, we were preparing to launch a new product called Swagger Inspector. It’s built for anyone who interacts with APIs, from developers to tech writers to support engineers. Using Inspector, you can make API calls, create API documentation, and create OpenAPI Definitions. (Here are some reasons you should create an OpenAPI Definition.)

We’d been in an early access phase for a few months, and had received user feedback about what was working well, what wasn’t intuitive, and what features they’d like to see in the product. The team had made great improvements, both in terms of functionality and ease-of-use.

However, something had been nagging at me. Conversion from our marketing page, where we tell you what the product does, to the product itself (only a click away!) was less than 50%. Some people internally thought that 50% was pretty good. After all, users had landed on the page almost accidentally, by clicking on “Swagger Inspector” from a dropdown option on a “Tools” menu, with no idea what they were going to. We weren’t marketing the tool yet, and there was no context for what they were going to see.

Tools menu

After clicking on “Swagger Inspector,” they got to a landing page that explained what Inspector did and prompted them to LAUNCH INSPECTOR. From there, potential users realized that *THIS* was a tool they needed in their life (obvs).

The choice “LAUNCH INSPECTOR” as the call to action felt a little off. I couldn’t help but wonder, is “launch” the right word to describe the experience of going to a webpage that is also the product? Launch sounds BIG, right? You LAUNCH a space shuttle! Or a missile!

That said, “launch” wasn’t inaccurate. How do you describe going to a SaaS product? What’s intuitive language to use?

I asked my marketing counterpart to experiment a little with the word choice, and she kindly obliged. We brainstormed a little. What was the right word? TRY? GO TO? OPEN? USE?

A thesaurus was of little help, offering such suggestions as “wide,” since that’s a synonym of “open.” Or so says thesaurus.com. WIDE INSPECTOR as a call to action would probably not yield the results we were after. We settled on OPEN INSPECTOR and made the change.

The graph below shows the conversion from the landing page to the product before and after the change from LAUNCH INSPECTOR to OPEN INSPECTOR.

Dates reflect week ending date; metrics reflect the previous week

As you can see, the conversion rate when the call to action was LAUNCH INSPECTOR varied from 42% to 50%. We made the change to OPEN INSPECTOR midweek where the conversion rate was 53%, so I’m throwing that out as a data point. Conversion trends upward over time at a rate of about .7% per week without page changes. My guess is that there are two primary reasons for this. 1) Public awareness and word of mouth makes it more likely that someone will continue on past the landing page over time. 2) Returning users visit the landing page to find Inspector and are more likely to go to the product.

We officially launched Swagger Inspector on January 23rd; you can see the impact the announcement made on our conversion. We received a LOT more website traffic during the launch week. In fact, there was a ten-fold increase in unique website visits thanks to our awesome marketing team. Interestingly, people who came to the landing page from press releases or product reviews were less likely to make it to the actual product. That incurred a 10% drop in conversion, from about 61% to 51% during the launch week. The following week, conversion went back to 61%.

Overall, we went from a conversion rate of 50% as a high point, to a conversion of 61% over a couple of weeks with our call to action change. Adjusting for the upward trending over time, that’s about a 10% increase in conversion overall with a single word change.

I wish I could report on additional words that were impactful (or not), but to date, we haven’t experimented beyond LAUNCH and OPEN. Perhaps a follow-up will be in order after more research. I’m very curious whether TRY INSPECTOR and GO TO INSPECTOR would yield better results. If you have experience with calls to action, I welcome you to post in the comments and educate us around words you’ve found that work well!

Thanks for reading, and if you want to try Swagger Inspector, go here! It can help you document and test APIs. We also have a great tool called SwaggerHub that can help you design and standardize APIs.