Google Case Study

Latitude increases homepage CTR by 29% and conversion rate by 56% for Emma‘s Diary. The Emma’s Diary online platform, part of Lifecycle Marketing, is the Royal College of General Practitioner’s award winning pregnancy guide for expectant mothers and health professionals. Chris Hill, the Digital Marketing Manager at Lifecycle Marketing is using Latitude’s PPC service offering for the Emma’s Diary and Mother & Baby websites and has undergone a two-stage conversion project with Latitude’s Conversion Analytics team to enhance the online performance of the Emma’s Diary site.

“Latitude managed our MVT Project from start to finish in a professional and structured manner to deliver an uplift in our ability to convert website visitors into customers.” —Chris Hill, Lifecycle Marketing

The Conversion Project Latitude‘s Conversion Analytics team has used web analytics and usability tool (heatmap) data to outline areas for improvement on the Emma‘s Diary website in order to eliminate any conversion bottlenecks. The data analysis had revealed a high bounce rate for the homepage, which had also been identified as the main entrance point for new users, and has shown that a lot of visitors that started the registration process didn‘t complete it. Latitude‘s Conversion Analytics team developed two tests to improve performance. Homepage MVT The advanced analysis helped to point out some key areas for testing on the homepage – the main banner and the right hand-side box. In order to test the effect of variations of theses elements, Latitude‘s Conversion Analytics team opted for multivariate testing in this case. Original

Variation

29% uplift in the homepage CTR after 4 weeks

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Website Optimizer Website Optimizer is an easy-to-use tool for testing site content that delivers actionable results http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

Registration Page A/B Test In order to test changes to the registration page which is focussed around a form, Latitude‘s Conversion Analytics team decided to use the A/B testing format, since data analysis pointed towards the need for page layout changes and it was also more important to look at the effect of changes as a whole instead of specific areas only. Original

Variation

Conversion rate increase of 56% after 4 weeks

“Latitude used Web Analytics and Usability data to establish a hypothesis for Google Website Optimizer tests that have helped increase our conversion rate by 56%” —Chris Hill, the Digital Marketing Manager

Conclusions The conversion project has highlighted how important it is to move away from only considering one page when trying to optimise the performance of a website. Reviewing web analytics data allows to identify all potential bottlenecks for conversion on a site. In the case of Emma‘s Diary it was possible to achieve a postive double-impact by increasing the number of people that progress into the conversion funnel as well as creating an uplift on the conversion rate. Results for this test have shown that using data driven methodology to create an hypothesis before testing leads to measurable results in short timeframes, achieving more stability as well than by completing numerous trial and error phases with unsubstantiated test ideas. Web analytics and data from usability tools helped identify the current shortfalls of the tested pages. Compensating any shortcomings like the lack of attention for the main call to action message and USPs on the homepage or the ease of use of forms can create great benefits with regard to the user experience and ultimately conversion. © 2010 Google Inc. All rights reserved. Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 3156121

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