Success Story

Viadeo Added 2 Magical Words To Increase CTR By Using A/B Testing

28% Click-through rate

About Soocial (now Viadeo)

[This success story has direct inputs from Soocial CEO, Stefan Fountain.]

Soocial is an online address book that helps you keep your phone, computer and online services contacts sane. The app syncs, merges, and provides backups so that you are never stranded without the contact details you need. It works with over 500 phone models, webmail (like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo), and your Mac and Outlook.

Soocial chose to use VWO – a/b testing software for their testing needs.

Goals

Their first test was to increase the click-through rate on the home page to the sign-up form.

Their home page featured a large Sign up button. They wanted to test the age old principle of adding free to the call-to-action trigger.

Tests run

They tested a number of variations with different buttons, including the word “free,” different colors, and adding text next to the button. Part of this test was to see if correctness would trump brevity.
For example one of the tested items was Free up to 250 contacts and another was It’s free. The first was technically more correct, and the second was shorter but less “correct.”

Here are the screenshots of the original version (control) and the winning variation.

Control: 14.5% Conversion Rate

Variation: 18.6% Conversion Rate

The only difference between winning variation and the original design is the presence of It’s free! along the side. And those 2 words increased the conversions by 28% (from 14.5% to 18.6%). This result was statistically significant and surely indicated that experimenting with the home page paid well for Soocial.

Conclusion

When we asked Soocial why they thought the winning variation worked, this is what they had to say:

Being the nerds that we are creating Soocial, we thought that the most “correct” version would get the highest conversion. Of course, the reason to use VWO is to confirm or deny our hypotheses and we will be testing a lot more variations in the coming weeks. Our hypothesis on the winning combination is that it doesn’t require any thought what-so-ever from users that it’s a low-risk solution.

We followed up the question by asking what lessons can be derived from the test. Here is what they had to say:

To be honest we aren’t sure yet [of what impact this makes to the actual sign-ups]. We wonder how these tests measure up to the goal funnels in Google Analytics and compared to actual conversions into paying customers. It could be that we get more users to signup and lose them later in the process. That is of course still valuable because it means we can have more call to actions to convert to a paying customer and test the conversion there.

Invaluable. The ease and speed of setting up the test is brilliant and we can wait to start seeing the results on pages behind our login [a new VWO feature] to test on converting users to premium accounts. It will be very interesting to see the test results merely by changing the wording, graphics and positioning.

Stefan Fountain
CEO