Penn Foster Registered a Soaring Increase in Conversions Using VWO Testing

Previous tests showed that the best way to increase both leads and enrolls was to send paid traffic to a more consolidated page instead of the full site, but it was never implemented on brand traffic before. Therefore, towards this end, the Penn Foster team hypothesized that creating a separate landing page with a high mobile speed score and less information would deliver a more relevant experience to the user. The main objective behind this test was to generate more leads and, in turn, get more enrolls.

Penn Foster’s paid search campaigns weren’t converting at the expected rate based on experience with brand campaigns and industry benchmarks. All of their branded traffic was being sent to their main website. Paid brand campaign traffic being more valuable, lower-funnel traffic, the team at Penn Foster was concerned about sending this traffic to the main site. They hypothesized that exposing potential leads to too much information would overwhelm them, thereby causing them to bounce off without converting to a lead.

When looking to optimize, the first thing that Penn Foster looks at is performance. The KPIs considered are – click to lead (CTL), click to enroll (CTE), lead to enroll (LTE), and the lifetime value (LTV) of those enrolled. After identifying pages that need improvement, the team at Penn Foster often use heatmaps and session recordings to identify possible pain points for users and find opportunities for improvement. However, for this test, they solely relied on quantitative data and VWO testing.

The Test: The metric tracked for this experiment was click-to-lead, and this is what control looked like:

Approximately 35,000 visitors became a part of the test that ran for 24 days, with one variation challenging the control. Traffic was equally split between the two experiences and delivered through the VWO Testing capabilities. 

This is what the variation looked like:

The variation won with a staggering 202% jump in conversion rate as compared to the control. A/B test your CTAs with VWO easily and quickly. Take your free trial today!

The winning variation has been made live across Penn Foster’s brand campaigns that were previously going to their main site’s homepage.

Penn Foster treats experimentation as an iterative process, and having moved everything over to the new landing page, the team carried out micro testing based on the optimization opportunities that VWO Insights’ heatmaps and session recordings highlighted. The future plan is to run similar tests on the remaining subset of campaigns that are still being sent to the full site. Build a robust CRO roadmap using VWO’s extensive suite of features. Take an all-inclusive free trial to explore the full range of its capabilities!