Big Bus Tours is the largest operator of open-topped sightseeing bus tours in the world, operating in over 20 cities across four continents and helping over four million tourists every year. The company’s website provides direct B2C sales for bus tours as well as guided walking tours and river cruises.

They wanted to increase revenue from their website, and tasked RocketMill with improving their on-site experience.

Using Google Analytics, we discovered that:

• Over 60% of total users on the Big Bus website were on mobile devices
• 54% of total transactions came from mobile users
• Conversion rate was lower for mobile than on desktop and tablet
• Of total transactions, 45% occur within the user’s first interaction on site

Because mobile devices accounted for most of the visits to the website, we focused on improving the performance of mobile within the checkout process (compared to desktop and tablet).

We found that the largest drop-off was on the page where the user needed to enter their details. This was seen across all devices, but was especially high on mobile. To decrease this, we ran an experiment using three different messages which were displayed in a banner at the top of the page check-out page. We chose to display the message at the top of the page so users within the experiment were most likely to see the banner on page load.

We focused on increasing the value proposition of the product, exploring varied motivational factors of the Big Bus product. Of all the locations that Big Bus Tours operates in, we chose New York due to the high level of traffic that would produce statistically significant results, quickly.

The highest performing version generated a conversion rate increase of 5% and a 7% increase in revenue, paving the way for more testing across the website.