We recently ran a test that improved our email enquiry conversion rate by 25%, but we decided not to make the change. Picture this. You spend months or years even building a website, and it works like a charm. You’re getting plenty of visitors and they are taking the actions you designed for them to take. Everything is great, right? Well, probably, but are you sure?
One thing we’ve discovered again and again here in RevaHealth.com is that it’s never worth assuming that you understand what your website’s visitors want when they arrive. In the past when we added new features we looked at a couple of headline metrics to make sure we hadn’t broken everything, and hopefully improved a key metric like conversion rate or reduced another like bounce rate.
Google Analytics & Website Optimiser
Nowadays we try and go into a bit more depth about things, making more subtle improvements to parts of the site that some visitors see and others don’t, and this requires more fine grain measurement than before. A key tool that we’ve been using for years now is Google Analytics. If you’ve not been using it (or something similar) on your site up to now, I can recommend it wholeheartedly. Right now we’re using it primarily for page tracking, but we’re hoping to use it for goal tracking and even event tracking in the near future.
Google Website Optimer
Another free tool from Google we’ve just started using is their Website Optimiser. On a site like ours where we get enough traffic and enough conversions in a day or two to our key pages to give meaningful results it’s a boon. We don’t have to do any of the maths or work out confidence levels or margins or error. It does it all for us. Best of all, we can test multiple changes to a page all at once, and see which combination our visitors use the most.
Testing Two Types Of Conversion
Recently we were discussing the two main actions that people take on our site: contacting a clinic by email and looking up a clinic’s phone number. The former is far more valuable to us a company. Our customers, the clinics, can see the end result of a visitor using the site to email them. When a visitor looks up a phone number it is very unlikely that the clinic will ever know that the visitor found it on our site. The clinics can see the value of one action, and not the other. Even though we tell them how many people find their phone number on our site, it doesn’t really resonate with them.
Knowing how much more valuable an email enquiry was, we decided to test whether taking away the ability to look up a phone number would cause a significant increase in the numbers who contacted a clinic by email. The results were pretty extreme.
25% Up, 100% Down
We tested a over a two day period with only half of our traffic having the ability to find a phone number. The half who didn’t have the ability to find a phone number converted to email enquiries 25% better than before, which would seem like a good result, until you look at the numbers involved.
Over the course of the two days the 50% who couldn’t see phone numbers created an extra 109 email enquiries. In the same period the people who could look up phone numbers did so 1,418 times. To put it another way, only one in thirteen of our visitors who wanted to look up a phone number created an email enquiry instead when that option wasn’t available to them.
In the end we decided that the cost of frustrating so many of our visitors far outweighed the gains we could make from having 25% more email enquiries. Phone number look ups are here to stay because they are what a large portion of our visitors want.
We already knew that a lot of people were looking up clinics’ phone numbers on our site, but testing it in this way gave us a very clear picture that those visitors are very different to the visitors who create an email enquiry, and they need to be treated differently.
Have you discovered unusual or unexpected behaviour from your site’s visitors? Are you giving them all the actions they are looking for? Are you tracking and testing them? Let us know your experiences in the comments below.
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