We have an application form that is used for various products, in this case we focused on the one used for an online current account.
The first page of this app form is what we call the 'Killer Questions' page. This is where you set the scene for the applicant in terms of the criteria they have to meet to continue with their application and what bits of information they're going to need to have to hand to complete the application process.
Typically we could expect around a 35-40% drop-off rate for this page. This could of course be because people simply dont meet the criteria and depart the app process. Alternatively it could be that the page design, which was by nature quite weighty in terms of the volume of info needed to be conveyed to the user at that time. Based upon the hypothesis that the content may be at fault we decided this was the best candidate for hosting our first multivariate test. Here we would test different content on the killer questions page to see if an uplift in number of people commencing the application could be acheived. We looked to gain a 5% uplift overall.
The Killer Questions page looked rather like this.
The 2 boxes are 'MaxyBoxes'.To effectively carry out multivariate testing on your website you're going to need a tool to host & serve the alternative page content you want to test and additionally a means of reporting the progress and outcome of your test. We opted for Maxymiser to acheive all this. The MaxyBoxes you see there represent the areas of the page that will have variant content served to the visitor.
So basically in this particular test we wanted to see what would happen when we served different security images in the top-right of the page and different page content or layout in the second MaxyBox on the page (the larger box).
We split the traffic 50-50. Half being served the default content, the other half a combination of new test variants we'd come up with. Coming up with alternative content is a whole new learning experience in itself as no one in our Optimization team is a copywriter or creative type but I'll go into this in more detail in a later post.
After several weeks of multivariate testing we ended up with a winner...
You may notice that this has a different security image to the original, has simplified page copy, all the heavy and intimidating legal wording was removed to a pop-up link.This page design resulted in 8% more people passing through the killer questions page compared to the default design. It also resulted in 5% more people going on to submit the application. When accept rate* was taken into account the new page design resulted in a 20% increase in productivity over the default design.
This test, although it's our first ever, will probably turn out to be our most important. This is because it was at the very last point in the visitors journey that we can influence whether they buy into the product or not. It's make or break time when they're on the doorstep of the application form, the point at which they choose to purchase or run away.
* note: You can apply for current account - but you might not necessarily be accepted as a customer, hence an accept rate.
