Companies and Conversions: Cottages4you improve checkout click-through by 21%
April 29th, 2010 | Published in Google Analytics, Google Conversions
Today we’d like to highlight a website analysis and testing success story from cottages4you.
Cottages4you is an online holiday cottage website offering visitors the ability to book holiday properties online or via a cottages4you advisor.
Cottages4you wanted to improve its conversion rate, turning more site visitors into completed reservations. The company consulted its Google Analytics reports in order to see the areas of the website that could benefit from improvement. Google Analytics showed that although many visitors came to the checkout introduction page (below), 40% did not progress further through the checkout funnel to complete a booking.
Cottages4you decided to use Website Optimiser to test a variety of alternative pages in an attempt to increase the number of visitors that continued past the checkout introduction page.
Before:
Before:
What to test?
Cottages4you had a few hypotheses to test:
- reducing the amount of text on the page
- shortening the explanation points for each section
- moving the form elements above the fold
- changing the travel agent log in section
Cottages4you tested a number of variations of the new checkout introduction page over a 3 week period until one variation begun to out perform the others. Below you can see the winning page.
This new page increased the number of visitors continuing to the next page in the checkout process from 60% to 73%. This is a 21% click-through improvement from the new page (below) compared to the original variation (above).
After:
This new page increased the number of visitors continuing to the next page in the checkout process from 60% to 73%. This is a 21% click-through improvement from the new page (below) compared to the original variation (above).
After:
What can you do next?
- Use Google Analytics to identify areas of your website that could benefit from testing
- Decide on some hypotheses you’d like to test and then create some alternative pages to the original
- Looking for testing ideas? Check out these previous posts from Gavin: Improve web-forms and Is your website easy to buy from?
- Use Website Optimiser to run new page variations concurrently until one begins to perform better than the rest
- Implement the best performing page and continue testing on other areas of your website
Have you had an analysis and testing success story you’d like to share on the Conversion Room? Let us know, send us an or leave a comment below.
Posted by Clancy Childs, Google Analytics team.