The sales funnel of a website is the set of steps that a visitor takes before making a purchase. The more difficult the steps to follow are and the greater their number, the more friction the web will have and the less sales you will get.
Your site loses visitors progressively through the different levels of the sales funnel. Having said that, this month we wanted to test whether by simplifying the steps of one of our sale funnels we could achieve better results. You can see the rest of the tests that we do every month here.
From the beginning, in our premium plugins we have followed a funnel structure on our web in which we first have a main page about the plugin. Then, from that page we visit the pricing page of the specific plugin. It is on this page where the final sale is made. Once the sale is made, the visitor goes to a thank you page.
Well, we are going to take the main page of Nelio Content and we are going to add an additional block to allow visitors buy the plugin directly from there, without having to visit the pricing page.
Will simplifying a level of the sales funnel mean a substantial improvement in the number of sales achieved? Let’s see…
Creating the A/B test
As we want to test a change in the main page of Nelio Content, what we are going to do is set up an A/B test of pages to test a variant of this page with the change against the original version.
We go to the A/B test list and create a new A/B test of pages. We create the variant, we set a title and a description to the test that serve as a reference, and then we edit the variant to apply the change we want.
The change we are going to implement is to add a specific block (which we have created for the occasion). Therefore, we only have to edit the variant and add the new block (Gutenberg allows us to easily do this).
You can see this block that we have added in the following screenshot. It is a block that we have put at the end of the content so that it appears before the footer of the page. The block contains a simplified pricing table and a purchase button:
Clicking on the purchase button automatically opens the dialog to type the purchase data required by our payment system.
Once we have the variant created, we have to define the actions that should trigger a conversion. To do this, we go to the goals section of the test and, in this case, we define three goals (which you can see in the screenshot above when creating the A/B test).
The first goal will count a conversion every time the purchase button is clicked, either from the block that appears at the bottom of the page in the variation we have created, or from the pricing page.
The second goal counts as a conversion the visits to the pricing page. With this we want to see what percentage of visitors end up visiting that page.
Finally, the third goal of the test is to count a conversion each time a purchase is made in the system. In this case, we count as a purchase each time the thank you page is visited, to which visitors are automatically redirected after making the purchase.
Now we just have to start the A/B test and wait for the results. Our A/B testing plugin is responsible for splitting the page traffic and showing each version of the test to half of your visitors without you having to do anything.
Nelio A/B Testing
I was very impressed by the quality of this plugin, how easy it was to set up, and the outstanding support Nelio provides. I highly recommend Nelio A/B Testing.
Josette Millar
Results of the A/B test
After having started the A/B test and allowed enough time to pass, we can analyze the results and draw conclusions from them.
In this case, we have left the test running for almost 4 months waiting to achieve statistically significant results. However, even after all this time has passed, the change has not been substantial to achieve enough statistical difference to choose a version of the page as the winning version.
However, this does not mean that we have been standing still. In all this time we have been testing other changes in other areas of the web that we will explain to you in the coming months. But now, we are going to see the results of each of the three goals.
In the screenshot above you can see the results of the goal of clicking the purchase button. We can see that version B, which includes the purchase block directly on the Nelio Content main page, is slightly better. It has achieved 3.3% more clicks.
On the other hand, in the following screenshot we see the results related to visits to the Nelio Content pricing page. As expected, the results confirm that in version B, which includes the option to purchase directly on the page itself, there are 5.5% fewer visits to the pricing page.
Finally, as far as sales are concerned, the version that we have created with the block to purchase directly on the main page of Nelio Content achieves 31.4% more sales.
Although the numbers we got here are not enough to draw strong conclusions, it is possible that simplifying the sales funnel can help increase the final sales we achieve. However, as we have already said, more tests must be done to be able to affirm this with a greater confidence.
Anyway, we have decided to leave the purchase block at the bottom of the main page. We have seen in the previous results that it is not a radically worse change to what we already had, and it can even help sales in some way. For this reason the block, for now, will remain.
Now that we have done the test with Nelio Content, we could study if with the main page of Nelio A/B Testing, our other premium plugin, the result is the same or there are differences. The good thing about A/B tests is that when you finish one, you have material to get ideas for creating more interesting tests.
How is the conversion funnel of your website? Do you think you could simplify it to improve your results? I will be happy to read your opinion if you leave me a comment below.
Featured image by YIFEI CHEN on Unsplash.
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