Consorte Marketing > Case Studies > Case Study: Landing Page Optimization

Case Study: Landing Page Optimization

Changes in layout design of FineTuxedos.com’s homepage increased shopping cart adds by 39%

Small tweaks to the layout of a website can render amazing results. Through our Landing Page Optimization strategy we increased the number of products people added to the shopping cart when visiting the homepage of FineTuxedos.com by 39%! Fine Tuxedos has been a leading online retailer in premium menswear since 1999. As a niche retail website with excellent SEO and a successful affiliate program, they have a great deal of web traffic. Our current goal is to focus more on conversion – turning more of those site visitors into people who make a purchase, through changes to the design, navigation and shopping cart. Increased conversion doesn’t just mean more sales overall; it means that affiliate traffic will convert better, and they will send more of it. It also means a greater return on investment for PPC and other paid advertising.

To do this, we developed a Landing Page Optimization strategy for Fine Tuxedos. In other words, we changed a few design elements, calls-to-action, banner placements, text and other factors in this ongoing process.

Heat map of landing page

We first installed heat map tracking on FineTuxedos.com’s website, enabling us to see where website visitors were clicking and what they were viewing. After gathering this information, we decided to begin our testing with the banners on the homepage, as many visitors land here first, before navigating to other areas of the website.

We tested several hypotheses using Google Website Optimizer (now part of Google Analytics, and referred to as Google Content Experiments) in order to improve conversion. Our first hypothesis – the subject of this case study – was that having two banners, with two different calls-to-action would be confusing to the user and reduce overall conversion. In the heatmaps, we noticed that many visitors were clicking on the big red button on the smaller banner, further down the page. Therefore, by removing the larger top banner, it would put more emphasis on the stronger call-to-action of the smaller banner, and also move more products up the page and above the fold. It was time to begin.

Combination 1: Winner – small banner only

Combination 2: big banner only

 

Combination 3: no banner

After running this experiment, we found that a single banner – specifically the smaller banner that was originally low on the page – was 39% more effective in driving users to add items to the shopping cart than the original layout. Like any good experiment, we ran multiple trials simultaneously (i.e. multivariate testing), including one where FineTuxedos.com didn’t feature any banners on the homepage.

As a result, we switched the FineTuxedos.com homepage to a feature a single banner, with the winning design. This is just one part of an ongoing process where we test changes to the website, and then implement the successful ones. As we increase the number of users who add items to the shopping cart, another logical step is to decrease shopping cart abandonment. In simple terms, we get more users to complete their purchase after items to the cart, rather than leaving the website without buying anything.

Through continuous testing of different banner and calls-to-action combinations, tweaks to the shopping cart and navigation, our goal is to strike the perfect balance between conversion and aesthetics. When it comes to making sales, a beautiful design isn’t always the best solution – there’s a lot that goes into the design of landing pages to make them convert your traffic into sales. The moral of the story? Test, test, and test some more!

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