Our client at Numerologist.com requested a conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit back in 2016. Although the company had team members with knowledge of CRO, they lacked the time to run the audit it themselves. Plus, they wanted a new set of eyes to take a look at the data. In this article, we cover how we prepared for the audit, the results we found, and what we concluded from the data. All of this is applicable to other businesses seeking to run a successful campaign.
We had detailed description of Numerologist.com target audience and marketing funnel, plus good volume of data to analyze as an input and managed to provide insights, which the client considered valuable enough to hire us to help them create and implement comprehensive CRO strategy.
Preparation period
The client notified us beforehand that his “hottest” period is in January and we needed to prepare everything to be able to experiment hard over this period to find and implement what increases conversion and revenue and throw away what doesn’t.
We started with a preparation period, which lasted around 2 months. During the preparation period we did a lot of analysis and based on the insights achieved, created first testing plan.
At InsightWhale we use standard processes to make work efficient and productive. These processes give a very detailed description on what steps should be done by the team, but we also need to make sure that these processes fit into client’s workflow. During that preparation process we also studied the way Numerologist.com team works and created processes to work with.
Having done this preparation process thoroughly, we managed to complete more than 60 experiments within 2 months period (end of December, 2016 – end of February, 2017), with more than 1,000,000 visitors participated in them.
Results of first 2 months of CRO campaign
After the hot beginning of the year period for the client was over and we could take a deep breathe after really intense work on the project, we did research on how our efforts affected client’s main marketing and business metrics.
We were comparing trends of the metrics for 7th of January, 2017 – 28th of February, 2017 with the same period last year (to be sure seasonality won’t affect our conclusions).
In our research we compared trends rather than absolute values, as we just started to work with the client and could only affect the values of the metrics which were when we stepped in.
Here’s ecommerce conversion rate change trend. From graph you can see that CR went to almost 2.5x in the end of the reported period compared to the beginning of it, while during same period last year conversion was changing within a range of 50% and in the end of the period came back to the same value:
Revenue per visitor also grew around 2.5x to the end of the period, while last year it returned to its initial value:
Another important thing to mention, that the amount of traffic that the site has received in reported period of 2017 was substantially higher than in 2016, meaning we actually managed to get higher CR from more traffic.
And even with that huge increase in traffic we managed to increase ROMI by 5%.
Conclusions
There were 3 reasons for such a successful campaign:
- Client’s participation in the project. The client had a pretty solid CRO expertise and understanding that CRO campaigns require engagement from their side, so we didn’t have to wait for their decisions and for any code implementations required.
- Thorough preliminary research and analysis. Having done a thorough preliminary research, we managed to prepare ourselves for client’s hottest season and experiment a lot and quickly find and implement what increases conversion and revenue and throw away what doesn’t.
- Efficient processes. We created a modified version of our CRO processes to meet internal web-development and marketing processes of this specific client which helped us work in an efficient and productive manner with quick turnaround.
