How we increased HR software trials for Breathe by 46%

In May 2020 Breathe’s Holiday Calculator page and How To Calculate Pro-Rata Holiday Entitlement blog were merged into one page with the aim of reducing cannibalisation and improving SEO performance. Since the merge, we have seen great improvements in rankings for the majority of keywords targeted and through ongoing opportunity analysis we identified further improvements could be made to increase overall trial conversions.

Using Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) our core aim was to increase free trials of the HR software through optimising the CTA on page to deliver minimal friction for the online user journey.

Our primary goal was to increase free trial sign ups from this page. The secondary goals were to increase:

• The number CTA banner clicks
• The number of mobile navigation CTA clicks

Our approach to CRO is as follows:

• Examine all available data in order to understand the challenges specific to the business in question
• Develop hypotheses from the data and design experiments to test them
• Use the insights generated to re-iterate and thus perfect the process

Using Google Analytics we discovered the following useful insights:

• The Holiday Calculator page is the 3rd most visited page on Breathe’s site and is key to introducing new users (68% of traffic) to the brand and their product offering.
• Of all traffic landing on the page, 85% arrives from organic search showing the importance of this channel.
• The holiday calculator was placed above the CTA, meaning that users can interact with the calculator without ever seeing a CTA resulting in 50% of users never seeing the CTA banner
• 90% of users who land on this page and convert, start the free trial process without any further pageviews. The way they do this is through clicking on the CTA in the navigation and on page CTAs.
• 31% of all traffic to the holiday calculator page was from mobile devices showing it is a key device type for this page. The navigation CTA was not immediately visible on a mobile device and it was contained within the burger navigation.

We formed following hypothesis:

Through making the on page CTA sticky and increasing the navigation CTA’s prominence on mobile, we will see an increase in on page CTA clicks and clicks on the free trial CTA in the navigation.

Testing

We ran an A/B split test in which 50% of users saw the control and 50% saw the variation using Google Optimize. The test targeted visitors from all channels and across all devices and ran from 10th – 30th September 2020.

Across all devices the on page CTA was removed and replaced with a sticky CTA which was fixed at the bottom of the user’s viewport. This sticky CTA appeared after 2 seconds to further emphasise it on the page.

There was no change in the messaging used in the CTA which suggests that visibility of the CTA alone was limiting the number of clicks on the CTA and thus free trials from this page.

Against our primary goal, we increased the number of trial sign ups by 46%.

Looking at the secorday goals, we achieved the following:

• Increase the number of CTA banner clicks by +213%
• Increased the number of mobile navigation clicks by +850%

Future Plans

This test was only targeting the holiday calculator page, however we believe that the optimisations used in this experiment would result in increased visits to the free trial sign up page if they were deployed on other high traffic pages. RocketMill has now launched an ongoing monthly programme with Breathe to help increase conversion rates of free trials across their high value pages.