It sure would be. I'm not finding where you're reading that, though. Since any improvement at any stage of the funnel flows straight to the bottom line in my business, that would imply a 10x increase in revenue.
Last year, unique visitors to trials was about 20% (57k / 292k). This year, it looks like about 15.5%. This is primarily due to a change in the mix of traffic -- my highest performing traffic is invariably those coming from AdWords ads, but AdWords has not kept pace with the rest of my business growth this year. The big drivers of increased unique visitors were organic SEO and the seasonal promotions, which brought in folks who were less interested in signup up for a trial than someone who had just qualified themselves by clicking on a call to action to Sign Up For Your Free Trial Today!
Has the conversation from trial-to-paid remained pretty constant?
No, it increased markedly. Downloadable trial to paid was 1.4% last year, 1.17% this year. (I think that decline is mostly due to cannibalization of the best prospects by the web app.) The web app trial to paid (new way to access old product, essentially) conversion rate was 2.33%. I push the online version VERY heavily, for the obvious reason.
What plans do you have to improve that?
Improve app, improve experience of purchasing app, etc. I segment before worrying about conversion rate, which is a subtlety I think a lot of Analytics For Beginners articles miss: if your prospect mix is changing, changes in consolidated conversion rates might reflect the mix more than it does the desirability of the product or marketing.
On the topic of A/B testing, I was clicking around your site and I noticed that when I clicked on certain top level navigation buttons (such as purchase) it changed my choices based on the context. If I recall correctly (I'm not a professional designer by any means), many design books are against that. What caused you to decide to do that? Did you discover it focused the user's attention better?
Thank you for sharing this information with us! Data is always fascinating and your story is inspirational :-)
What caused you to decide to do that? Did you discover it focused the user's attention better?
I used CrazyEgg on my purchasing page, watched there be a lot of clicks on the top level navigation elements, figured "But wait, if they click any of those I don't get paid", started an A/B test with the consistent design versus a stripped-down menu, observed improvement with the stripped-down menu, and put my design books to use keeping my kitchen table level.
In addition to collecting numerous mentions from luminaries in the community, actually using A/Bingo has been key to my ongoing conversion optimization efforts. (Last year, for example, I had approximately 1.4% conversion rates for the downloadable version of the software.)
Since you list this year's download-to-paid conversion rate as 1.17%, I assumed you were talking about the visits-to-trials conversion rate, as going from 1.4% last year to 1.17% doesn't really strike me as something that went right in terms of conversion rate optimization :)
I didn't take the aggregate conversion rate into account.
It sure would be. I'm not finding where you're reading that, though. Since any improvement at any stage of the funnel flows straight to the bottom line in my business, that would imply a 10x increase in revenue.
Last year, unique visitors to trials was about 20% (57k / 292k). This year, it looks like about 15.5%. This is primarily due to a change in the mix of traffic -- my highest performing traffic is invariably those coming from AdWords ads, but AdWords has not kept pace with the rest of my business growth this year. The big drivers of increased unique visitors were organic SEO and the seasonal promotions, which brought in folks who were less interested in signup up for a trial than someone who had just qualified themselves by clicking on a call to action to Sign Up For Your Free Trial Today!
Has the conversation from trial-to-paid remained pretty constant?
No, it increased markedly. Downloadable trial to paid was 1.4% last year, 1.17% this year. (I think that decline is mostly due to cannibalization of the best prospects by the web app.) The web app trial to paid (new way to access old product, essentially) conversion rate was 2.33%. I push the online version VERY heavily, for the obvious reason.
What plans do you have to improve that?
Improve app, improve experience of purchasing app, etc. I segment before worrying about conversion rate, which is a subtlety I think a lot of Analytics For Beginners articles miss: if your prospect mix is changing, changes in consolidated conversion rates might reflect the mix more than it does the desirability of the product or marketing.