Conversion Optimization Case Study: Best Dating Canada
Best Dating Sites Canada is a website that writes reviews on dating sites and monetizes via affiliate linking to them. They came to us looking to increase the out-going click-through-rate from their site to the affiliate sites in an effort to raise revenue per visitors. After several tests and optimizations we were able to raise revenue per visitor from $1.01 to $1.25 creating a **24% increase **in total revenue.
A site like this is tricky because the only page you can adjust is the review page on the domain. That means that the statistic we measured was click-through-rate, which we measured in Google Website Optimizer as a ‘conversion’. We have a workaround we use to achieve this which you can read about here:
Here’s what the original and optimized pages look like:
First thing you always want to do in the beginning of any job is figure out the **value **of the business behind the website - Why it deserves to be in the marketplace. For a review site, this is obvious - reviews. And every review site will have unique reviews that another site won’t - a quality that all review sites share. The purpose of a landing page is to **express **its value, simply that. I thought of a few things that may express that strongly and decided to test them.
Let’s break down what we did and why… hopefully it will help you on your own sites.
[dropcap]1[/dropcap] **Added User-Submitted Reviews: **The value of a review site is the quality of it’s reviews - and user-based reviews are the most valuable since they are unbiased. I believe that in the future as more and more users add reviews, the value of the site will increase resulting in more user engagement. But knowing that they are available should increase trust in the site immediately.
[dropcap]2[/dropcap] **New Headline: **Stated the reason they are here. In the end, they just want a date - and they are reviewing dating sites to increase the chances of them finding good dates. I test the headline ‘Get the Right Dates - Join the Right Dating Site!’. We tested this against “See what others have to say about the Best Dating Sites in Canada!” which is a different angle expressing the value of unbiased reviews. I thought the second one would do better but I was wrong, ‘Get the Right Dates..’ performed best.
[dropcap]3[/dropcap] **Replaced Images: **The images for the original were banner ads. People generally don’t like to see ads, so I tried using the logos of the dating sites instead.
[dropcap]4[/dropcap] **Tried Different Button Texts: **I tried ‘Start Dating’ v.s. ‘Sign Up Free’ - In comparison to the phrase ‘a means to an end’, I guess you can say ‘Start Dating’ is the ‘end’ and ‘Sign up Free’ is the means to that end.. I used these texts so I can test those concepts against each other. ‘Start Dating’ the better click-through-rate while ‘sign up free’ had the better conversion rate. But in the end, ‘Start Dating’ created more profit.
I also tried testing a little bit of pre-sell text next to the button that said ‘Get a free account by using our special link’. This was an effort to be more clear about what’s next, and although this helped conversion, less people clicked it. In the end, the page performed better without it.
The treated page shown here was the one that did the best out of 3 variations. I hope this helps you increase your own conversion rates!
