

Signups increased by 60% after actually removing the signup form - paraschopra
http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/signup-conversion-rate-ab-testing/

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pygy_
It's not very surprising. The original page was not very good.

The form was too prominent. It shadowed the product description.

Furthermore, putting it on the left made the conversation/narrative backwards.
You first convince people to sign up, then present the form, not the other way
around.

The second design corrects both of these mistakes, but correcting them without
removing the form would probably have improved the conversion rate as well.

~~~
nhebb
I agree. This reminds me of the book _Why we Buy_ , about the buying habits of
retail shoppers. When shoppers walk into a store, there needs to be a
threshold where they can acquaint themselves with the surroundings. Anything
that is too close to the entrance gets ignored by most shoppers as they walk
in. Sites with sign-ups on the front page feel that way to me. I haven't had a
chance to see what the product or service even is yet, and they're already
pushing me to register. I like a little front matter before making a decision.

~~~
paraschopra
Interesting analogy. And this is what veteran internet marketers keep doing
with the never ending sales page (for parrot training kind of ebooks). Have
you noticed how they have call to action at the end of the page and never at
the top?

~~~
swombat
Actually, they repeat the call to action many times throughout the page, in
the long sales letter format.

~~~
paraschopra
Yes, but it is never at the top (before making a case for call to action).

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robryan
Spamming sites looking to harvest emails look a lot like the first in terms of
presenting a form. That's the first thing I notice on the first page. The act
of clicking on the button means the user as committed some effort towards
signing up and is more likely to continue whereas on the main page even if
they have chosen to start the form they haven't quiet committed in the same
way.

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Tomek_
This reminds me of "Sign Up Forms Must Die" article by Luke Wroblewski
(<http://www.alistapart.com/articles/signupforms/> with some additional
resources here: <http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1219>)

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mike-cardwell
Maybe it was because the "100% FREE Ecommerce Website" title was much larger
and prominent in the non-form version.

~~~
funthree
Yep, also not quite the same verbage. I would put most of the weight on the
change to this headline, as well as its better styling with the whole website

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thesz
After reading some number of such stories I come to conclusion that you should
tweak your user interface until you discover drop in signups (or other
important parameters).

Basically it amounts to manually perform hill descent algorithm. ;)

~~~
paraschopra
But that will only be optimizing for local optimum. What you need is a shake-
up from time to time and that means testing radically different ideas!

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Tyrant505
I think the reason for this is our innate hatred for signing up for
things(work). Putting this right in front of you may make it easier and
quicker to get to the function, but: "uhg another form"

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QuantumGood
Provides no competition to the back arrow. Made me stare at the form, and
flick my eyes around vaguely for any mention of purpose or benefit. Very
poorly done originally.

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fishercs
The original was very off putting, it almost looked like a magazine
subscription flyer. I can see why the revised version performed so much
better.

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arturadib
Could it be a statistical fluke? I'm very skeptical about reading too much
into A/B results without variance/confidence interval estimates.

~~~
paraschopra
It wasn't a fluke -- variation was statistically significant better than
control (we never publish results otherwise). Clients are never happy to see
their actual conversion rates and variance, etc. published in the real world,
that's why I choose not to write about those figures.

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Charuru
I can't say this with any authority, but looking at it, having the sign up
form in the beginning is not good. They might have better results with an
embedded signup if the signup form is at the end of the page.

Also the background of the signup form is a terrible dark blue color, what's
the color of the signup form on its own page?

~~~
paraschopra
It's white. Here is the form which appears after you click on Signup page:
<https://secure.vendio.com/ecommerce/litelogin/hosted_store>

