An insight into how Mavlers used the power of AB testing in realizing enhanced CRO

As a marketer working for a brand or a business owner, you want to get maximum conversion rates and, subsequently, better ROIs from your online platform. 

We at Mavlers understand your concerns and the desire to be very sure about the recommended CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) changes that SEO professionals may make before implementing them.

Because, let’s face it, no business owner wants to invest in a ship that won’t sail or weather storms. You want to see results before you part with those hard-earned dollars.

That makes sense, complete sense. 

Recently, we got in touch with Kiran Bajpai, our in-house senior SEO analyst at Mavlers, who helped a client realize improved conversion rates from their website with minimal initial investment, deploying the power of AB testing using the right fit SEO tool.

Let’s examine the two key challenges that the client faced before she began her endeavor with us.

• Not-so-optimal current ROIs
• Investing money only when real visible results could justify the initial investment 

If you are facing similar challenges and want to be very sure before putting all your eggs in one Kiran Bajpai basket, this blog should come as a ray of hope or the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel!

The client’s initial scenario

The client came in with a request to unravel strategies that will help draw the right traffic, therefore, better conversions and improved ROIs to her website.

After conducting the initial website audit, we had certain AB testing in CRO recommendations that involved major design and development changes in the website.

However, the client didn’t want to end up buying a lemon and wanted to see concrete results before investing a hefty amount of money (which is quite understandable and fair enough).

To address this valid concern, we decided to conduct AB testing cost-effectively to gather the necessary evidence.

The meticulous journey of finding the right tool 

On our end, the battle began with zeroing down on the right-fit AB testing tool that would be cost-efficient and deliver the expected results. 

We researched various options, evaluating their features, cost, ease of use, and integration capabilities. After careful consideration, we selected Zoho PageSense, which suited our unique set of requirements.

The second major challenge we faced was finding the right cost-effective solution for the significant design and development changes required. Images needed to be redesigned, and some other features, such as CTA buttons, etc., needed to be fixed on the back end. 

In order to solve the problem, we got in touch with team Zoho and used PageSense’s capabilities to meet basic design requirements (such as changing the color of the CTA text or its font), whereas, for the more extensive changes, we had to rope in our in-house developers.

An insight into what the AB testing process looked like

As Kiran Bajpai pointed out, “The whole process of implementing effective AB testing required cross-team collaboration. Specifically, this involved close collaboration with the tool’s support team, our development team, designers, and SEO experts to ensure everything was set up correctly.”

So, we began AB testing with the client website’s home page. There were two versions for the experiment in Zoho PageSense, the original (control) and the variant1 version of the home page, that had the requisite CRO implementations suggested by our experts. 

Let’s look at the changes we made in variant1 of the website’s home page:

1. Homepage banner – The banner images were updated to fix previous errors.
2. CTA button – We added some margin/ padding to get CTA buttons at the same level.
3. Background image – Background images were made blurry to improve text legibility
4. CTA button font style, size & element – Requisite changes in the CTA button, font size, and other elements
5. Aligning of all the buttons – Uniformity in the buttons was missing across the pages, so that was fixed
6. CSS changes on the CTAs – Design-level changes were made
7. Product menu changes – We improved the user experience by fixing the product menu in the header navigation bar where the hover exceeded the page length.

Zoho PageSense allows us the freedom to divert the incoming traffic to a particular page (home page, in this experiment) in a set, pre-decided proportion. For this particular case, we set the traffic disbursement ratio to 1:1 (fifty-fifty).

In simple terms, if a hundred people were to visit the site’s home page on a given day, fifty would be shown the original client version, whereas the rest of them would view the variant1 version (the one that has the requisite CRO changes implemented).  This then allowed us to judge the resulting conversion rates from each version. 

Going live

Source

Once the preparations were complete, we launched the AB test. It ran smoothly, and we monitored it closely for one week.

Results achieved

The results were impressive and are attached herewith for all to see. Our recommended changes led to a significant increase in leads and, ultimately, conversion rates. 

This validated our suggestions and gave the client the confidence to implement the changes on their live website.

Once the client was satisfied with the results, she suggested implementing the suggested CRO recommendations on the original website home page.

Here’s what the post-CRO implementation results looked like,

The road ahead

On that note, it is quite evident that cost-effective improvement in CRO can be achieved with the confluence of the right intent, purposeful deliberation, and expertise. We now suggest reading ~ The Ultimate Guide to Mavlers’ SEO-optimized Website Development Services.