Next Project >
I was on a team of CRO experts helping businesses across multiple industries increase engagement and revenue on their websites. I worked with clients, project managers, and developers to create A/B test plans, interactive prototypes and funnel analyses to increase conversions and revenue per visitor.
At Conversion Fanatics I worked on over 40 websites spanning e-commerce, affiliate marketing, and software-as-a-service. I assisted in monitoring A/B tests and collecting both quantitative and qualitative user data in Google Analytics and CRO platforms like Convert Experiences and VWO.
CRO and UX are complementary disciplines. Both require analysis, user research, design, and validation. In CRO the goal is to guide users to take a specific action and optimize the experience for the business as well as the user. Because user response is integral to increasing conversions, I touch every step of the process for my clients so that I understand the big picture and can make proper recommendations. The following is an overview of my process:
A client who sells premium, high-priced furniture is not getting a large sale volume despite having a decent amount of qualified traffic. They are having the most success with lower-priced items, but cannot lower prices in order to make sales due to production and delivery costs. They would like to learn more about user motivations and increase the sales on items in the higher price range.
We began our user journey where we tried to discover points of friction from the perspective of a user. This meant gathering some initial data:
- Heatmaps revealed that users are not scrolling much on the homepage or product pages.
- About half the homepage visitors do not scroll below the full-screen hero and instead navigate immediately to the collections page.
- The products below the hero that lead directly to product pages are getting decent clicks, but only by users who scroll.
- GA showed us that despite product pages receiving the most qualified, paid traffic, the homepage was still the highest-converting landing page.
- The most popular product was a $100 shelf that was receiving little direct or paid traffic.
- Ads that were bringing users to the site were focused on the desk with a price in the $1000 to $1500 range, and directed to the desk's product page.
From the observations we made in the research phase, we surmised that many users were not getting immediate access to engaging information about the product offerings. Since users were not likely to scroll on either the homepage or product pages, many users were missing key info before being shown a premium price tag.
To account for the user behavior we observed in the research phase, I began looking for ways to optimize the area above the fold on the homepage. This meant the hero image would need to be our primary focus. The key changes for the hypothesis were as follows:
I presented a few options for the new hero to the client, and built out the following two for approval. There were two directions/psychologies we wanted to explore, but we only had enough traffic to test one at a time.
The first hero would be completely product focused. I wanted to explore an image that would show multiple products in a stand-alone light to show off the breadth of the brand. I designed a version that would dynamically rotate between items. In selecting a video, for this one I wanted to show the shelf; the best seller with a conservative price. The idea was to give users an introductory product where they could see benefits and explore more expensive products now armed with the knowledge that the furniture features versatile elements that justified the price tag.
The second option would keep the lifestyle composition of the first image, but with fewer extra focal points. I used photoshop to extend the edges of an image to make it fit in this format. This version would feature the highest priced item in the video in order to encourage more sales of that specific item rather than booting sales of an already decently-selling item.
Because the client was primarily interested in trying to sell more of the desks, they chose to approve the lifestyle image (option 2) as the first test on the site. Their business goal was to focus on the higher-ticket items, and the desk already had ads ready to go with the desk as a focus.
I finalized the design and used Adobe XD to hand off assets to our team's developer. We worked together to make the layout responsive for all devices with an emphasis on the most common screen resolutions provided by Google Analytics.
We used Convert Experiences to bucket 50% of users who landed on the homepage into seeing our new hero. We tracked metrics across the funnel including product views, add-to-cart actions, purchases, bounce rate, and other metrics. The test ran for two weeks with no edits to traffic allocation or down-funnel experiences.
Out of respect for the client's privacy, I cannot give detailed metrics into specific numbers or revenue, but I can share the lift and loss numbers.
Since we emphasized a high-ticket item on both devices for this test, the mobile experience suffered, but the overall revenue and conversion rate across all platforms was up. This correlated with our finding that many users made larger purchases on their computers rather then their mobile devices.
Google analytics confirmed that purchases and increased revenue were largely due to a large increase in desk purchases. Since the price was higher, revenue per visitor was increasing drastically faster than the conversion rate. Users also seemed to spend less time bouncing between products and comparison shopping on the site and more quickly made their selections with the new hero, which was reflected in a lower view count on the collections pages and product pages. Users were getting the information they were looking for earlier in the funnel, so those who moved forward were more qualified leads.