With offices in Los Angeles, New York, and Mexico, The Fertility Institutes’ provide reproductive medicine, testing, and Assisted Reproductive Technologies—such as In Vitro Fertilization—to would-be parents across North America.
The Fertility Institutes’ website (http://www.fertility-docs.com) was at the start of their paid search campaign when they realized that they needed help. Their in-house staff could drive traffic to the site, but they knew little about testing and optimizing their landing pages.
To make matters worse: The test page that The Fertility Institutes had chosen was the promotional page for an embryo screening and sex selection service. The page had few visitors--far too few for a multivariate test in a realistic time frame. However, it’s leads turned into high priced sales, which The Fertility Institutes wanted more of.
The Fertility Institutes approached VKI to help them develop and test alternate landing pages, as well as train them on the process.
VKI's UX experience, and a guided A/B test! VKI set out to identify potential areas of improvement, create alternate pages with higher conversion rates, and test them with a simpler A/B test, all the while coaching The Fertility Institutes’ staff on using Google Web Optimizer. VKI's process included:
VKI's first step was to identify a conversion metric. As the sales process itself was long, and the service both complex and expensive, the page was intended simply generate leads: to coax a potential customer into contacting The Fertility Institutes. With the service being costly, and the sales team bragging a very strong conversion of submissions to patients, VKI decided that a form submission, a simple button click, constituted a valuable and numerable metric.
Without the opportunity for a full multivariate test, our usability staff applied a series of tests to determine what would likely perform best.
VKI performed the following tests
VKI established that the purchase of the service offered was rarely made lightly, instead it was a highly considered decision. The targeted customers wanted to know details about the procedure, and how the service works. However, in attempting to sate these desires the current page presented an intimidating amount of detail and scientific explanation that left the average user stranded in a sea of scientific discourse.
Thus VKI set out to develop a page that more clearly stated the benefits of the service, provided a laypersons summary of how the service worked, and better coaxed the user to convert.
VKI predicted that the pages conversion rate could be improved through seven usability improvements: the removal of distractions to the user; effectual enhancements using imagery; improved layout and design; unified font and styling; better communication of the benefit of the contact form; a redesigning of the contact form; and the use of several anchors across the page that lead to the contact form.
VKI removed distractions to the intent of the page, including reducing the number of links off the page, and removing both the visitor location map and extraneous icons.
Big decisions require a sense of certainty and security, and nothing is a bigger decision than having a child. VKI predicted that the current pages format and choice of imagery was too cold and aloof. While the baby image was good, VKI decided that there needed by be imagery that enforced the concept of balanced family life. They also predicted that by testimonials from previous and current patients, expressing why they wanted to select the sex of their child and how The Fertility Institutes made it possible would have immensely positive effects.
The previous layout was cluttered and lacked focus. VKI predicted that by reworking headlines and explanations with bullet points and other visual cues to highlight the most important benefits of the procedure they could increase conversions. Also, they endorsed a classic essay style to the page, providing general introduction and summary at the top with more detailed information down below.
"The 'inverse pyramid' style that we used is optimal for providing varying levels of information to a wide range of users. Those interested and willing to read more will look further down the page, while those interested in quick summary can find a brief, layman's explanation of the procedure at the top. "
The page used too many text-faces in too many colors, with too many styles and weights, giving it a cluttered disorganized look. Also far too much text was in all caps, making it hard to read. Finally the body text was too small. VKI predicted that by resolving these problems they could increase readership of the page, and thus increase conversions.
Communication with the client reveled that when people sign up they receive an informational DVD and are contacted by a nurse who can answer whatever questions they may have. Yet this was never stated on the page. VKI predicted that this could greatly motivate users searching for more information to sign up.
While the contact form was quite good, VKI predicted that by using the introductory text to reduce anxiety, eliminating all unnecessary fields and adding reassuring statements next to the submit button, they could alleviate patient insecurities about the sign up process.
Given the immense page size VKI predicted that the use of anchors--with motivating anchor-text--to lead users to the sign up form at various points through the page could increase sign ups.
VKI walked The Fertility Institutes through each aspect of implementing their recommendations, including using the GWO control panel; understanding JavaScript; setting up both A/B and multivariate tests; tagging pages; launching experiments; validating experiment, page views and conversion data; and analyzing and understanding data. They then set up and ran an A/B test between their suggested page, and the original. The results were astounding.
Google Web Optimizer reported a 100% certainty that the changes suggested would result in positive results. How positive? The test reported a 122% increase in form sign ups.
What does this mean in monetary terms? For Fertility Docs that meant a seven figure increase in revenue.
That is the power of testing.
