Increasing User Engagement with A/B Testing
Improving user experience is one of the many factors taken into account when working on conversion rate optimization (CRO). CRO is a necessity when driving PPC traffic to any website. Why? Because so much is on the line when you pay for traffic. By using CRO, you are often able to improve efficiency and stretch your marketing dollars further by increasing the conversion rate of your website.
In our most recent case of CRO, our client needed to reduce the bounce rate on their website and increase user engagement. By reducing those two metrics, the hope was to increase sales and conversion rate. We couldn’t simply use landing page testing or A/B tests on the product pages like we have in the past with other successful CRO projects, because this client has a unique situation.
“We saw this as an opportunity rather than a problem.”
Our client sells somewhat complex products online. It’s not as simple as having users browse and buy a product that they ‘like’; it’s giving their users an exact part or product that they need. With over 100,000 products on their website, we noticed that a number of users would search the site for a few minutes and leave without purchasing. In some cases users would chat or call the customer services reps, which would result in increased sales and conversion rates. We heard the opportunity knocking…
We saw this as an opportunity rather than a problem. The Granular team researched and implemented a new chat service with a user-centric approach. We were able to tie the chat service into Google Analytics to accurately track how many chats occurred, which customer service rep chatted, how many chats led to a sale, and many other eye-opening metrics.
Example of our Chat Metrics
By designing and moving the call-to-action (CTA) into a more visible and user-friendly location on the website, we immediately saw an increase in chats per day. This was a win. But we’re never happy with just one win. We went into brainstorm mode and came up with a few additional ideas. Next, we enabled an active prompt to chat with the user. This slid the chat prompt up on the page with an initial outreach message to the user. We saw another improvement in engagement from that test. Lastly, we decided to A/B test how the chat prompt looked. With the addition of a customer service rep head-shot – we saw an amazing improvement in engagement and more importantly an increase in conversions and sales.
Our Winning Chat Button (client name redacted)
With our data-driven conversion rate improvement features implemented, we sat back to measure and watch the chat volume increase. We will continue to make small changes to our chat implementation in order to increase chat and chat-based conversions even more in the future. But for now, we refocused on driving quality traffic to their website via paid search channels.
Chat Engagement Improvement
The winning chat image test resulted in an incredible 68% increase in chat activity. We measured the impact based on the percentage of users who engaged in chat. We also noticed that users who chatted stayed on the website an average of 15% longer and they converted at over 300% higher than users who did not chat.
What we’re showing here is that our paid search services do not end with the click. At Granular, we track and measure as many metrics and signals as possible in order to improve our clients’ overall success. By creating and harvesting large amounts of user data we are able to better target and serve the users on our client websites, and drive positive data-driven results.
