California Pizza Kitchen (CPK) is the place to go when you’re craving hearth-baked pizzas featuring Thai Chicken or Jamaican Jerk Chicken, among many others. Since 1985, CPK has continued to bring something different to the table—California-style pizza. The company’s global flavors and open kitchen continue to delight guests from Beverly Hills, CA, to Glendale, NY.
CPK also offers an easy and convenient online ordering service via their website. Unfortunately, the website doesn’t feature any dish recommendations. Could CPK increase its number of online orders by enticing users with customer favorites? We could test that.
The Opportunity: The Current Homepage Could Use Another Method for Grabbing Attention
When you land on CPK’s website, you’re prompted to “Order Now”. You’ll also see food categories you can choose from, including pizzas, pasta and appetizers. Although this might be one way to entice visitors to start their food order, it might not be the best way.
Indeed, some customers may feel overwhelmed at their choices, especially if they’ve never placed an order before.
The Control
Our Hypothesis: Adding Product Recommendations Will Increase Product Add to Carts and Purchases
When visitors are unsure what to buy or order, they tend to lean on product recommendations or social proof to inspire them. Plus, product recommendations also give customers confidence in their buying decisions.
At Cro Metrics, we’ve run many tests involving “Best Seller” or “Popular” content and we’ve seen great results. For example, in a test we ran for an online grocery store, we tested adding a carousel of “Great Cart Starts” towards the top of the page. As a result, we saw a 112% increase in Add to Carts and a 4% increase in account creations.
These results illustrate the fact that visitors are typically looking for content they can take action on right away, especially when shopping for food. Although CPK’s website allows customers to start their food search by category, showing more personalized content could be more compelling.
The Potential Fix: Add a Recommendations Carousel to the Home Page
We would add a recommendations carousel beneath the hero image, complete with images of some of CPK’s most popular dishes.
We hypothesize that this change would capture visitor attention and match their motivations when visiting the website. As a result, CPK could see an increase in product add-to-carts and purchases.
The Variation
What Can Cro Metrics Test for You?
What looks like a small website change might be the change your business needs for serious growth. That’s why testing is so important. What can Cro Metrics test for you? To learn more about our experimentation programs, send us a message.