How a simplified decision process and contextual landing page design affects conversion
Compassion International
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 06/13/2018 - 07/04/2018
Compassion International receives tens of thousands of child sponsorships every year. Traffic comes to the Compassion homepage from many different sources, with many different motivations, which has made it difficult—if not near impossible to validate homepage tests to increase child sponsorships.
The search process for Compassion.com generally contained four choice options: boy/girl, country, age range, and birthday. Previous tests had shown that prioritizing one (in this case, birthday) as the primary choice could increase “sponsorship starts”, but couldn’t validate a lift after going through their four-step sponsorship process. So with the birthday selection driving more “starts”, the team decided to focus on the next page, which was a grid of children who shared the selected birthday.
There were two primary hypothesized issues with this second page: first, the grid produced an overwhelming number of choices, so many that it required its own “sorter” at the top. Second, the page gave very little context to the action that had preceded it—a birthday selection. The only indication that the children shared the birthday was a single strip of text that read like code: “Showing results for Birth Day: 2, Birth Month: January”.
The team hypothesized that if they could help the user make decisions by reducing decision friction and adding contextual relevance to the page design, they might be able to increase sponsorships.
They crafted a responsive treatment based on a landing page that had produced a lift in sponsorships from banner advertising that featured the birthday search. This new page picked a single child who shared the birthday and featured them at the top, along with contextual design clues (confetti) and a bold headline that declared that the child shared the selected birthday.
They split traffic from the homepage button “search now” to determine if this treatment, combined with the homepage birthday selector, could produce a lift in sponsorships.
Research Question
Will a simplified decision process and contextual landing page design increase sponsorship conversion?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Original | 1.5% | ||
| T1: | Variation #1 | 1.7% | 14.4% | 96.1% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 25,997 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 57,404, and the level of confidence is above 95% the experiment results are valid.
Flux Metrics Affected
The Flux Metrics analyze the three primary metrics that affect revenue (traffic, conversion rate, and average gift). This experiment produced the following results:
0% increase in traffic
× 14.4% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The treatment, with reduced decision-making and contextual design that oriented the reader, produced a 14.4% increase in conversion. This test alone resulted in an additional 1,168 sponsorships each year (a 1.7% increase in annual sponsorships)—and generating nearly $2.9 million dollars (based on Compassion’s $2,500 lifetime sponsor value).
This shows the power of simplifying the process—a single decision, instead of four, followed by a single child, instead of an endless grid. This also implies that the customer might not be as choosy as we think, we might just need to help them find and suggest the right child. It also shows the power of contextualized design—if we can help people understand that they are in the right place, then they are more likely to follow through with the intended action.