Pricing tables are an institution on the Internet. Any website that intends to sell a product or service will use a pricing table for this purpose. You will find them in all imaginable colors and designs. Finding a pricing table format that works best is an art. Small changes in its content or interface can lead to big sales gains, or destroy the benefits of your website.
For this reason, today I am going to tell you about my experience making changes to the pricing table of our premium plugin Nelio A/B Testing. Let’s start.
Simplifying the Pricing Table
One of the things that I’ve been wanting to test on the web for a long time is a radical change in the Nelio A/B Testing’s pricing table. This table is quite complex, since it includes 3 different plans, each with its monthly and yearly price, the number of allowed page views, and a list with the most relevant characteristics included in the package. And, of course, a purchase button.
Following the ideas of minimalism, a change that is interesting to make in the pricing table is to simplify it so that it has much less content and is much more direct. The current table that we are using has a whole section with the characteristics of the products, which also appears further down the page, in a detailed comparison. If the visitor is interested in knowing more about it, they can always go there to see it.
Therefore, if we remove this part of the table for each plan we gain space within the first fold of the site and we can type a title that motivates the visitor to take action and buy our product. In addition to this, we can expand the size of the purchase buttons to make more emphasis on this action.
The Nelio A/B Testing pricing table is defined in PHP, in the template we use for our pricing page. To create this test, we had to duplicate this template and make the changes I have just explained to you. You can see the result in the following comparison between the current version and the simplified version:
When it comes to an important change, it would be crazy to just apply it on our website. The correct thing is to A/B test it to compare both versions and discover, with real data from our visitors, which one works best. This is what we have done.
Setting up the A/B Test
To create the A/B test we use our own plugin, Nelio A/B Testing. You just have to download it from the official WordPress plugin directory and install it on your website. Nelio A/B Testing is very versatile and allows you to create this A/B test for the pricing table in two different ways:
- We can create an A/B test of pages and create an alternative page as a copy of the original one in which to use the simplified pricing table template.
- Or we can create an A/B test of page templates and select as the original template the one we are using on the pricing page that includes the complete table, and as alternative the new one that we created containing the simplified pricing table.
This time we have opted for the first option, but both are valid and equivalent. You can see how we defined the test in the following screenshot:
In addition to selecting the original and alternative page, setting a title and a description, the interesting part here is the definition of goals. In this test we have defined 5 different goals, which will give us 5 sets of results, each one focused on a different aspect we want to count:
- Clicks on the purchase button of any plan.
- Clicks on the purchase button of the basic plan.
- Clicks on the purchase button of the professional plan.
- Clicks on the purchase button of the enterprise plan.
- Actual sales, counted when the visitor sees the thank you page upon successfully subscribing to one of our plans.
Once we have it ready, we save the test and start it. From that specific moment, the traffic of visitors who see the pricing page of Nelio A/B Testing is divided into two groups: some see the complete pricing table and others see the simplified version. And, of course, the actions that we have defined in the goals are tracked to see which version works best.
Nelio A/B Testing
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Analyzing The Results
The test has been running on our website for a period of almost 6 weeks. During all this time, we have been able to analyze the behavior of more than 1,600 visitors.
Let’s take a closer look at the results of each of the goals defined in the test. The first goal looked at how many clicks we get on any Purchase button:
The complete pricing table achieved a click-through rate of 10.75% while the simplified table performed 11.2% worse. However, the difference is not big enough to say that the complete table wins with statistical significance. Neither variant stands victorious for this goal.
Now let’s take a look at the results we got when focusing on the basic plan only:
In this case, the two versions of the pricing table worked identically, with extremely similar conversion rates. Again, we have not found a clearly winning option, so we continue with the following goal, which you can see below:
In this case we are seeing the clicks to the professional plan. And here we have indeed found a clearly winning version: the complete pricing table. In the previous results the simplified pricing table has a conversion ratio that is 43.1% worse, with a degree of statistical confidence greater than 95%.
Finally, we have the clicks on the enterprise plan, the most expensive of all:
Although the complete pricing table works better than the simplified one, we have too little data to establish a winner with sufficient statistical confidence.
Here it was very interesting to see that this plan hardly receives clicks from visitors. It is clear that it should be modified so that it becomes more attractive and receives much more attention. We have work here to think about whether it is a matter of price or of differentiation with other plans.
Finally, let’s look at the goal that tracks sales:
It is the only goal in which the simplified pricing table works better than the original table. However, the difference is not so high as to choose it as the winning version, statistically speaking.
Conclusions
Given the results we have obtained from the A/B test, we conclude that the version we have created of the pricing table, simplified in terms of content, has not worked as well as we hoped for. Therefore, we should not apply it on the web, since the version we have now works better than this new simplified version.
We have avoided worsening the conversion rate of the web thanks to testing the changes before applying them directly. And we have also seen that we must study in more detail the characteristics of the most expensive plan from the point of view of business strategy, since currently it does not have all the interest that we would expect.
Everything you can know about your visitors with a simple A/B test is vital to increase the performance of your website. Do not hesitate and start yours on your site.
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