Bank in September we made several changes to RevaHealth.com to improve visitor engagement. One of these changes was to add breadcrumbs into the header of the page for visitors that want to broaden their search criteria. We weren’t 100% sure about this feature and we have been keeping an eye on our metrics to see what their effect is.
Overall we were very happy with the results of the experiment. Bounce rate was down by about 4% and the average number of pages viewed was up by 15%. Best of all conversion levels also increased, and not just because less people were bouncing. So we were happy, right?
Well no actually. Since we had made several changes at the same time and only done A/B split testing and not multivariate testing we did not know which changes had contributed to the positive effect. This is a frustrating state of affairs because although the overall effect was positive certain features may actually have been having a negative effect but were being compensated for by the other positive ones.
So in order to get a better picture of what had worked and what hadn’t we dug through our logs and metrics looking for anything out of the ordinary and we discovered some startling information. Despite the breadcrumbs occupying some of the best real estate on the page almost no one was clicking on them.
Over the two month period of November and December the breadcrumbs were clicked on 18,000 times by 15,000 visitors. Over these two months we had 700,000 visitors (note December is a seasonally low traffic month) visiting 2.9 million pages. Just 2.1% of visitors were clicking on the crumbs resulting in less than 0.7% of all pages viewed.
So The Breadcrumbs Were A Failure?
Unfortunately life isn’t that simple. The breadcrumbs may have had other benefits that their poor usage was masking. It could be that their presence on the page put the information being displayed into better context for the user resulting in our reduced in bounce rate or it could be that they were the catalyst that increased the conversion rate. However, since we didn’t do multivariate testing there was no way for us to tell with our data.
So What Can We Do?
It’s simple really – we’re going to do more testing. We are going to roll out a version of site without the breadcrumbs to see if their presence has any affect on our bounce or conversion rates. Once again this is going to be a straight A/B test rather than multivariate testing. If by having the breadcrumbs on the page we don’t observe a noticeable reduction in our bounce rate or an increase in our conversion rate, then we will have to ask ourselves whether we could be using that prime real estate more effectively.
Do you use breadcrumbs on your site? Do your visitors use them at all or are they there purely for information purposes?
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