How have we increased sign-up rate by 400% in one day

The login and sign-up process is a waste of time from the users’ perspective. Nobody wants to spend life on typing personal data while using mobile devices. On the other hand, it is sometimes impossible to implement important functionality without it. We were looking for a way to solve this problem in the context of gebraucht.de.

Gebraucht.de is the second-hand marketplace for used goods. It offers an easy and safe way to buy and sell high-quality products. Users can access the platform via website, iOS and Android applications.

Only logged-in users are able to buy and sell merchandise on gebraucht.de. Mandatory registration can be perceived by the user as yet another difficulty and so, make them simply give up and leave the site or the app. We were looking for a way to increase the sign-up rate before the user decided to buy or sell something.

The experiment

There are many ideas that we can verify to solve the problem. We have to conduct an A/B test in order to check which solution is the best.

We split the users into two same-sized groups. The first group (control group) will see the old version of the application. The second group sees the modified version of the app.

We wanted to check the hypothesis: It’s better to ask the user about login or sign-up as soon as possible. If it’s done later on then you have a greater chance to delay their action or increase the drop date.

The users are able to log in or sign-up only from the onboarding screen in gebraucht.de. We decided to show the onboarding screen to all unlogged users who return from the background on mobile apps.

This simple idea is very easy to implement. It requires only the integration of a 3rd party tool for a/b testing. We use mixpanel for this job.

We planned to measure the sign-up rate in the first day after the first app launch.

Results

The experiment took one week but after the first two days the results were clear to everybody:

The increase after making the change is 427%!

Focus on things that matter

This number looks great. There is a strong temptation to make a final recommendation at this moment. The point is not do it immediately, but to first focus on major KPI-s that matter for gebraucht.de.

What really matters in the context of gebraucht.de is:

• Buying rate
• Selling rate
• Retention

After analysing these KPI-s we made a decision if the modification should be applied.