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Would adding a lodging widget to the bottom of a webpage increase the number of overall purchases? Find out in this episode.

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: Really excited to talk to you guys today about how we should highlight options to improve conversion.

So we have a client who is a hospitality client who’s a luxury outdoor experience provider.

Another thing we should just ship, rebrand them.

And what we were trying to face was there is a lot of traffic, especially over the summer months that comes from organic search landing pages where users are really looking for content on some of these outdoor areas and experiences.

And so what we found is a lot of these users are looking to explore the outdoors but weren’t available – or weren’t aware that there are product offerings available through the site directly.

For some of these kind of top of the funnel visitors.

And so we decided to try and monetize them.

So this is an example of one of these.

This is the main top organic search landing page to explore a really beautiful area.

And as you can see for users coming here, other than a phone number, there isn’t really any place to take action and to create or generate any revenue for the client.

So what we decided to do was try and add a lodging widget to the page to see if we could get users to take action directly from this page, rather than going through the site deeper to try and find calls to action and increase revenue.

So the hypothesis was, again, that users visiting for summer experiences aren’t aware of all the options available.

By highlighting lodging, we’ll be able to increase revenue generation from users that land on this page.

So since I did not show the results to anyone, does anyone have any questions on how this test ran?

Cristi Alvarez: So is adding that thing at the bottom there that…

Cara Binsfield: Yeah that’s a really small change.

And we intentionally put it below the fold because the thought was that users that are coming to this page really want to understand about the experience.

And so we didn’t want to create a disjointed experience putting that lodging widget above the fold…or make it seem too salesy.

Cristi Alvarez: And then what’s the what’s your primary KPI on this one, like bookings?

Cara Binsfield: It’s actually total purchases.

So there are other things users can buy from this site, like tickets and passes for experiences at this hospitality resort, things like that.

Carl Light: Cara, were there any other secondary metrics tracked in this test?

Cara Binsfield: Yeah, we always track revenue.

And then there were other things we tracked kind of just to understand if it was being disruptive to the user experience because this client does have a really high focus on their brand.

So transactions and purchases are incredibly important, but we don’t want to be skewing like visits to other pages or causing people to like not come to the site overall in general…which we gauged by kind of like what pages, what other pages they were viewing and if they were still looking at weather information and those kinds of things.

Cristi Alvarez: I’ve been going with all the variations today, so I’m just going to keep it consistent and go with V1.

I think just having that additional action that people can take can help prompt people or maybe match the motivation for why they’re on the page.

So I’ll go with V1 as my choice.

Any other insights before we actually vote?

All right.

Let’s get into it.

OK, thumbs up if you think V1 won and thumbs down if you thought the control won and then in the middle if you think it is inconclusive.

Cara Binsfield: So it looks like a lot of you guys think V1 won.

And since I never showed the results, I don’t know how you could have guessed that, but it was a 3% lift in total purchases across the site.

So this was a really exciting test that more than paid for itself, even just during the course of the test.

And we learned a lot about the user and the fact that when they’re landing from these pages, they aren’t aware of how easy it is to get lodging opportunities here.

What we saw was based on the clicks users did click through to all the other pages on the site at a higher rate, but they clicked a little bit less through to things like camping, et cetera.

So there are users looking for this luxury resort in particular to have lodging, and we were able to pull that lodging reservation forward and get it on the site.

That was really exciting.

Thanks for watching.

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