
How we increased landing page conversion from 5% to 55% - vinaykuruvila
http://quicksprints.com/
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duck
You really should link to the actual blog post as this will be totally useless
when you add another one.

[http://quicksprints.com/post/32792397474/how-we-increased-
la...](http://quicksprints.com/post/32792397474/how-we-increased-landing-page-
conversion-from-5-to-55)

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allbombs
I don't know if I agree with everything here.. is the goal to capture
emails/signups, or to get users that will use your product and provide
meaningful feedback?

I know it's a chicken and egg problem, you want a large enough sample base to
get users using the product but with vague messaging you are attracting people
that wont use your product (people that you shouldn't target) and people that
WILL use your product but don't understand the vague messaging. I would
suggest taking all versions of the page and signup methods to test usability
of the product. Optimizing on the initial signup is great, but if your users
don't use the product after they signup bc it's so vague.. then you've just
wasted all that optimization effort. Unless the goal is to create a huge list
of signups.

Also, where is traffic coming from? Paid, organic search, social media, press
release, tc, etc? That has a huge difference on your results. And what tools
are you using to run the tests and what is the sample size? I think readers
would love to hear those tidbits too

Thanks for sharing your findings.. good luck =)

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creativename
Yeah, I actually have the immediate response of bouncing back from that type
of landing page. I have no idea what it does, so I have no incentive to sign
up. I suspect that some may sign up just to find out what it is. I wonder what
the effect would be of having that as well as some button or link to "Find out
more"?

I think the results here speak more than any guesses we might make, but I'm
just astounded with the results.

Side note: I was able to click "Sign In", and then from that page access the
"About" page from the footer. That told me at least a little bit more about
what the service is actually for.

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vinaykuruvila
Yup, the "Find out more" link is a great idea and something we're in the
process of trying. We're doing an experiment with creating a 30 second video
about the benefits of the site. We're planning to have a link on the landing
page which says something like "Watch a quick video to find out more" which
opens up the video for those users who are curious but not curious enough to
sign up right away.

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JoelMarsh
I find a couple of the conclusions of this article very misleading. A couple
of the lesson are great, but I feel the need to point out a few conclusions
that are not quite spot-on:

1\. Random photos are better than screenshots

Everything is better than straight screenshots. You didn't show what you were
using before, but at a dismal 5% conversion I am guessing it was straight
screenshots that weren't "posed" on a device or anything? Photos that have
relevant content and even a minor emotional effect will say more than your
screenshots ever will. I don't think I would call a football and baseball
image "random" on a sports site, though. They are more relevant to a sports
fan than a screenshot.

2\. Large Background Photos Convert Really Well

That is not universally true. The two screenshots you have provided
demonstrate the effect of focus in a design, not the effect of background
images. You have used a background that is not only relevant, but is high-
contrast colors and blurred, which creates a "foreground" out of your form.
That will make the user's eyes go directly to the form rather than getting
lost in your boring headlines, etc.

3\. Inciting curiosity works better than clarity

It's interesting that you interpreted this as "curiosity" rather than benefits
vs. features. Your original headline was a classic mistake. "A social network
for sports fans" is a useless statement. No benefit, no motivation, no reason
to click. "Follow sports together" is inherently more appealing because it
describes the benefit of the service and has a social motivation built in.
THAT is what you have done. Curiosity is not relevant.

4\. Focus on the value proposition for brand new users, not advanced users

Duh. I don't want to be disrespectful, but this is a pure numbers rationale.
In any market there will always be a small minority of advanced users compared
to the vast majority of basic users. This will be true for every service,
ever, unless the only people that could possibly understand the offer are
advanced users.

5\. Allowing users to sign up with their email increases FB/Twitter sign-ups

This was a good one. It is usually less effective to give people an ultimatum
(register or leave) than to give them options to compare (would you rather
register with FB or email?). Users will focus on the choice rather than the
"yes or no" if you give them useful options to choose from. I once read an
example test where more people were willing to pay for an a set of partially
broken dishes if they were compared to an incomplete set than if they were
sold alone. Same principle.

6\. Figure out and optimize for the target demographics that convert the best

In the age of analytics, it is futile to define target audiences before
statistics are available. It is much better to do as you have done: launch it
and let your target audience identify itself. Good lesson.

~~~
vinaykuruvila
Great feedback, Joel.

1.)“ You didn't show what you were using before, but at a dismal 5% conversion
I am guessing it was straight screenshots that weren't "posed" on a device or
anything?“

I looked hard for a screenshot of our original landing page but couldn’t dig
one up. The screenshots were of the parts of our site that were resonating the
most with our most engaged users, and we got good feedback on both the
screenshots themselves and the visual design. However, we found that the
additional complexity for our average user in having to parse and understand a
bunch of screenshots is not as effective as a sports-related photo with a
simple, powerful tagline and explanation.

“I don't think I would call a football and baseball image "random" on a sports
site, though.”

You’re right, random wasn’t the right word. We meant that we didn’t experiment
much with the photo itself or ask for feedback from a wide list of sources.

2.)“Your original headline was a classic mistake.” We are not just talking
about taglines or even comparing the two taglines we showed here. In fact, “A
Social Network for Sports Fans” is almost as vague as “Follow Sports
Together”. We experimented with a lot of other options for messaging and many
which were more detailed and clear (3 bullet points on the key benefits of the
site, for instance).

In these experiments, we consistently, we found that simple but curiosity-
inciting messaging works better than more detailed and clearer messaging.

4.) This lesson is obvious to us now, but was not obvious from the start. By
sharing our results we are hoping that others will avoid our mistakes, even
the ones that may be obvious to you.

5.) That sounds like a cool study. I'd love to read about it even you can find
the link.

6.) Thanks!

~~~
pitchups
> _... people were willing to pay for an a set of partially broken dishes if
> they were compared to an incomplete set than if they were sold alone..._

I think this is similar to what is described by Dan Ariely in his book,
_Predictably Irrational_ , as the Decoy Effect. Relevant excerpt from
Wikipedia [1]:

"People not only compare things, but also compare things that are easily
comparable. For example, if given the following options for a honeymoon -
Paris (with free breakfast), Rome (with free breakfast), and Rome (no
breakfast included), most people would probably choose Rome with the free
breakfast. The rationale is that it is easier to compare the two options for
Rome than it is to compare Paris and Rome. Ariely also explains the role of
the decoy effect (or asymmetric dominance effect) in the decision process. The
decoy effect is the phenomenon whereby consumers will tend to have a specific
change in preference between two options when also presented with a third
option that is asymmetrically dominated. This effect is the "secret agent" in
many decisions."

In your case the third choice - email - is the decoy or secret agent - making
the other two options more attractive for ease of use.

[1] : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational> Edit: Wikipedia
link

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russell
What I took away is that women like to share things and men follow women. This
isnt snarky, but an observation that might be applied to other sites that are
not obviously women oriented.

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bdunn
I'd be curious to hear about how you onboard new users - from all appearances,
the vagueness/single page sort of force people to register if they want to
learn about the product. What kind of onboarding or lifecycle setup have you
implemented - and any preliminary stats you can share?

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papercruncher
That is a great question. We spent a lot of time designing our signup flow and
are currently on the third major iteration. The one thing that we find works
consistently well is to give the user something to do as soon as they sign up.
For Sidelines, that something is selecting your teams. The drop rate on that
screen is extremely low and we speculate it will approach zero as soon as we
add more sports. We are also working on implementing a "tour" of the site as
part of onboarding, showcasing the various features because we did get the
feedback that things can be confusing initially.

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sunkencity
Why do you have a hooded figure that's making the gesture I wonder, at least
for soccer fans it evokes the notion that it's a hooligan - if you're trying
to get the user to relate. I'd go for hood off and see some non-gender
specific hair. YMMV.

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nnq
PLEASE, do NOT follow this advice, PLEASE: 1."Random photos are better than
screenshots" 3."semi-vague messaging on a landing page is more powerful than
clear and detailed messaging"

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ovi256
No, the advice is not "random photos" and "vague messaging" but "Do A/B tests
ASAP" - as soon as you have enough traffic to do them (yes, there's a
threshold, under it you're playing dice, not A/B testing).

~~~
nnq
...hopefully the other 99% of people reading it get the RIGHT message, as you
did. there's still hope for mankind it seems :)

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unreal37
OK, this question is coming from someone who works in marketing as his full
time job.

So you're saying providing details is bad and vagueness is good. Vagueness
"incites curiosity" which increases signups.

Not sure if I like that. Feels a bit unethical. You are intentionally holding
back information for the sole reason of increasing signups. If you showed the
product, or listed the features, or provided more details, signups goes down?
That's a sign you need to improve your product.

~~~
vinaykuruvila
We're seeing more signups, more engagement, and more activity. Not sure how
that is a bad thing?

"So you're saying providing details is bad and vagueness is good. Vagueness
"incites curiosity" which increases signups."

Not really, we're saying that for certain kinds of free consumer apps,
curiosity can be a very strong motivator for someone to try a product. (This
kind of tactic would never work for a paid product for instance or a product
targeted at business users.)

Vagueness doesn't necessarily incite curiosity, but asking first time users to
parse detailed messaging often kills it prematurely, and you've got to find
the right balance that optimizes conversion. This is what worked well for us.

Finally, there are many other tactics that we're successfully using to turn
the users who just signed up into active, engaged users and they are mentioned
elsewhere on this thread.

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mratzloff
> Inciting curiosity works better than clarity

How many of those new users continue to use the service one month later vs
your previous engagement levels? Just curious.

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vinaykuruvila
It's hard to measure since we've seen engagement levels consistently rise over
the past month, but we've also been doing a lot of OTHER work to increase
engagement and bring people back to the site. For instance we've been driving
community/discussions around specific teams on the site, sending out email
notifications/newsletters, FB notifications etc, optimizing FB open graph- all
of which have been pretty effective for engagement. It's still unclear whether
there is a direct correlation between clarity on the landing page and longer-
term engagement.

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habosa
This was extremely interesting. I'll definitely have to take the time to make
one of those newfangled "huge bg photo" landing pages with my signup form.

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philip1209
I've used the CSS on this Github repo to make landing pages with full-
background images quickly:

<https://github.com/mloberg/Launch-Page>

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sushihacker
Cool stuff! Semi-vague messaging working better for you goes against any
intuition I ever had about landing page conversion

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LanceJones
You can do many things to spark curiosity in visitors to a landing page. Some
may grant you a few extra minutes to follow their curiosity... but then what?
Most of them will get an answer to their questions and then stop using the
service. We see this on checkout flows where people will put something in
their cart because they are simply curious about shipping costs and taxes.
Then the site owners wonder why there is such high cart abandonment.

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schumaniac
(I'm a co-founder at Sidelines.) LanceJones, you're exactly right: A key
lesson from our landing page experiment is that vague messaging incites
curiosity in users, and curiosity can be a powerful motivator to get users to
spend an extra few minutes to sign up for a service. This same user may have
decided to bounce off the landing page if it went into the details of the
value proposition (this is what we did with the initial versions of Sidelines'
landing page), so the vague messaging has a better chance of getting the user
through the door. However, whether or not the site is able to keep the user
engaged post-signup depends on a number of different factors: The engagement
numbers for sidelines have consistently gone up as we keep optimizing our sign
up flow once the user logs in, the first run experience of the product, the
welcome email, email/FB notifications, newsletters, etc.

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EGreg
What are some good tools to measure the kind of stuff they report?

Demographics and invitations Whose invitations are more accepted And so forth

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papercruncher
We are not using anything fancy, it's just Google Analytics, redis and
postgres. If we send anything out to the world (email, link to partners, open
graph action) we tag it either with a google analytics campaign or a unique
identifier so we can trace it back to our database. Every 12 hours, using a
bunch of SQL commands + API calls we get a report in the mail.

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johnjones
I love the Super Bowl picture but I wonder how many remember the outcome of
that play (was not good)

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duck
I wonder about the licence to use NFL photos?

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vinaykuruvila
We bought licenses for the photos from Getty.

