Conversion Rate Improved by 86pc and Acquisition Costs Halved

Project Background

During 2008 and early 2009, The Translation People, one of the UK’s leading translation services businesses had made significant investments in their website, developing a modern, interactive site which is designed to act as a significant lead generation channel, via an online quotation form. In addition marketing budget is invested each month in both natural and paid search to increase the number of visitors the website receives.

In June 2009 Steve Wilde, Managing Director at The Translation People, attended a conference in Liverpool aimed at helping business owners identify opportunities where they can improve the profitability of their businesses. It was at this event that Paul Rouke, User Experience Director of PRWD, delivered a presentation entitled ‘Three Steps To Improving Online Performance’ and it was through this event that the idea of improving the on-site conversion rate of The Translation People website was first discussed.

Objectives

As with almost all serious businesses, The Translation People were investing each month to drive more traffic to their website, although they had never invested money in actually improving the conversion rate of their website. This led to expected scepticism as to the potential value of investing in a project to improve the on-site conversion rate.

PRWD and The Translation People agreed on the following two objectives for the project:

1. Deliver an improvement to the conversion rate for visitors arriving on the website and then submitting an online quotation
2. Provide the business case for making continual monthly improvements to the conversion rate of the website

What We Did

Expert Usability Evaluation

We provided an initial expert evaluation of the existing online quotation facility, providing recommended changes which we expected would help improve the visitor conversion rate.

Analytics Evaluation and Improvement

We also evaluated their web analytics account to determine how well their website was performing for their key target audience, a process called advanced traffic segmentationwhich is one of the topics covered in our Advanced Google Analytics Training Course.

Design Alternative Conversion Pages

Following the expert evaluation, we designed alternative versions of the online quotation form which utilised various key elements which we felt would lead to an increase in the number of visitors completing the form.

Split Testing To Improve Conversion Rate

Over the course of five weeks we then implemented a series of split tests using Google Website Optimiser, where we tested two alternative versions of the online quotation form to determine which version delivered a greater conversion rate.

Following each test the version which performed better was used in the subsequent test, and this continual improvement process was continued during the five weeks.

Results

Over a seven week period The Translation People saw:

• On-site conversion improved by 86%
• Cost per acquisition reduced by 44%
• Adwords performance improved by 172%

Client Comments

"PRWD provided a knowledgeable insight into website visitor behaviour and put forward suggested improvements for our online quote service that were then proven to be effective through live testing. Conversions have improved since not only in volume but also in quality and we are very happy with the result."

Steve Wilde, Managing Director, The Translation People