Can adding additional navigation options to a page reduce friction in the user journey and increase conversions? The answer might surprise you.
Watch this episode of The Cro Show, a game show for conversion rate optimization and marketing experimentation fans, and see if you can guess which test variation performed better during a recent Cro Metrics client experiment.
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Full Transcript:
Cara Binsfield: Hey everyone. So today I’m going to tell you all a little story about a time when we removed friction from the user journey.
This is for a luxury hospitality brand client. So picture yourself on the beach and Isla relaxing in a pool where you can see the ocean but you don’t have to touch fish.
And basically the basis for this test was that we notice that mobile was underperforming. It consists of about 58% of traffic for this client, but only about 25% of total conversions.
There’s serious room for improvement on mobile, so we decided to take a step back and ideate specifically on ways that we could try and get that mobile conversion rate maybe not on par with desktop, but slightly to a higher performance rate.
So we started doing some mobile exploration and we decided that on mobile pages, when you look at the resort pages on desktop, there’s this resort specific navigation bar that users can click into. And it allows them to drop down to different pieces of content on the page.
But on mobile that bar doesn’t exist and so users have to scroll all the way down to find the information they want and then click off to an additional link.
So users really don’t have access to all of the information right at their fingertips, so it inspired us to run a test to add a resort specific navigation bar to mobile users, guiding them to the various amenities.
So that’s the basis for the test. Does anybody have any questions?
Cristi Alvarez: So I see in the variation treatment here, so is it kind of in the middle you guys put it right in the middle of the screen and does it stick while they scroll? Or does it stay?
Cara Binsfield: Yeah, if they scroll up – heat maps showed that there’s not a ton of scrolling happening, so this was a pretty safe place to put it, but yeah.
Cristi Alvarez: It’s interesting, I don’t think I have ever seen one kind of in the middle there like that.
Cara Binsfield: Yeah it was – we talked about a couple different options and decided to try and match it to the desktop treatment.
For now, we’re debating changing the design in an iteration, but if this were to perform well, that might be what we do.
Bonnie Buchanan: Do the exposed options there match what is tucked away within the hamburger menu on mobile?
Cara Binsfield: Yeah, so there’s also additional options in the hamburger menu so that there are things that wouldn’t fit across the screen, they could still click on too since mobile’s got less width.
Cristi Alvarez: I think my guess is going to be on V1 because it’s helping to get people to potentially – it’s matching their motivation for coming to the page and like where they want to go. It’s making it really clear and obvious where to go.
Cara Binsfield: Great, well without any further ado, I will ask everyone to open up and take a vote.
Thumbs up for variation. Thumbs down for control. Oh wow. People seem to really like this test.
OK, well TBD on our guessing strategy so…
This test was actually like a huge winner which was really exciting. It turned out which I kind of accidentally gave away a little bit while describing answering Cristi’s question. Sorry bout that guys.
But basically it was a 28% lift to conversions in the 31% lift to revenue so that still doesn’t get us quite on par with desktop performance but really exciting lift for the client.
I left next steps is TBD ’cause there are a lot of different things we’re talking about but potentially looking at a different design for this.
Cristi Alvarez: That’s great. How long did you run this test for?
Cara Binsfield: Three weeks. It was either two or three weeks, so the lift was so big we didn’t have to run it very long, which was really amazing.
Cristi Alvarez: Yeah, that’s awesome.