My landing page conversion experiments continued
aka; How conversion rate optimisation is addictive.
Note: If you haven’t read my first post about this, How a few small landing page tweaks created five times the conversions, then you really should, as I build on the experiments of the last post.
Since my last post, I have continued to experiment with the same landing page, pouring effort, head scratching and a little PPC budget (Google AdWords, global budget, same ad copy, same day range (these are all one week rounds) and the same destination URL), to further look at ways of improving the conversion rates of my landing page.
Experiment 4
I started experiment 4, by using the winning variant in experiment 3 (see last post). This variant, the one with the background image was then duplicated and the only difference between the two experiments is the button colour on the form.
To have a difference between variants, I tested two form headings; Get your 25 day free trial! and Get a 25 day free trial! My feeling being that the latter speaks more to the visitor than the first.
Before you read any further, try and guess which one would win?
The outcome was an interesting result. Perhaps it was because I had twice the traffic for this experiment than experiment 3, but neither variant improved on the last experiment winner of 26.4%.
Variant A came in at a lowly 5.5%, whilst Variant B was the winning one here with a conversion of 11.6% (a difference of more than double, 6.1%) This goes to show that the form headline in context with ‘you’ not ‘a’, was, as I had guessed, a sure winner.
“It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.” — Jeff Bezos, Founder Amazon.com
Experiment 5
In all my experiments to date, I have used very short landing pages, basically just the average screen depth, and therefore I felt it was time to try a longer, more content rich page. So for experiment 5, I started a whole new layout and brought over what we had learnt had worked with experiment 4, being the ‘your’ in Get your 25 day free trial.
The new layout featured dot points of features above the fold, and both the previously used screengrab of the 6Q dashboard, as well as the background image from previous experiment, below.
To add some ‘social credibility’ I added a customer testimonial as well as the addition of logos from a few media outlets we’ve had 6Q appear in.
The difference betweeen these two is the first word in the main headline ‘Measure” in variant A, and “Boost” in variant B, and the smaller tag lines underneath, with variant A (Above) uses “Quick set-up and less than six minutes per week for awesome surveys”, whilst variant B states ‘Improve productivity and create a happier team in minutes per week”
This resulted in a closer conversion rate between the two. Take a guess before reading on; is it variant A or variant B?
If you had guessed variant A, you would have been right, A had a conversion rate of 17.6% whilst variant B had 3.6% lower conversions, at a lowly 14%. At least the winner here still had a better conversion rate than the winner of experiment 4, being 11.6%.
Experiment Six
Since the last experiment still wasn’t getting the same conversion rates of experiment 3, I decided to see if I could reduce the content length. This version was somewhere between the very short experiments I started with, and the longer page I had just used in the last iteration.
I kept the testimonial and media logos, and dropped the two columns directly below the first panel.
This time I tweaked the two sub-headings, for the panels below, with;
Sub-heading A ‘Just a few of the many benefits…’ versus ‘Smart companies are finding 6Q helps…’ and;
Sub-heading B ‘Customer success stories’ versus ‘Customers in 35 countries, including’.
The outcome of this experiment was terrible.
Variant A lost with only a rate of 2.7% and Variant B fared much better, but not good enough, with a conversion rate of 8.6% (more than three times better than Variant A).
Well, at least I am discovering what doesn’t work, dammit.”
— Miles Burke
Conclusion
To conclude this post, I am no further ahead in conversion rates as I was by the end of the first three experiments. I had hoped for better, but then at least I have undertaken these trials and not given up.
Whilst many people would just revert back to the winner of experiment 3 and sit back, I’ll continue to try to improve upon it, and as I write this, I’m keeping a close eye on experiment 7, currently underway.
I’m keen for your feedback, and I regularly my share growth hacking, start up and other finds on Twitter, find me at @milesb
If you found this post useful or interesting, I’d appreciate you pressing the recommend button below. If you’d like to know more about the start-up I’m working on, please take a look at www.6Q.io — hint; there’s even a 25 day free trial if it interests you. :)
