Harnessing experimentation to deliver an ROI of more than 30x for thortful

As with almost all of our conversion rate optimization programs, we started off with a thorough audit of thortful’s website to identify where and how we might produce the biggest impact. 

On this particular occasion, we ran two separate research studies. The first was a benchmarking study, which consisted of an analytics review, competitor analysis, and a heuristic review. This allowed us to identify low-performing areas of the website and to begin forming hypotheses to explain these observations.

In addition to the benchmarking study, we also ran a qualitative feedback study, which included a number of customer surveys as well as user testing. This allowed us to delve deeper into the psychology of thortful’s users, which helped us understand the ‘why’ behind the behaviors we’d been observing . 

Audit complete, we were then able to use insights unearthed during this research process to develop a number of strong, evidence-backed experiment concepts.

One such concept centered on the user flow between thortful’s product listing pages (PLP) – where their various card designs  were displayed – and their product detail pages (PDP) – where information about individual cards was shown.

During our analytics audit, we noticed an abnormally high dropoff rate between the PLP and the PDP. 

Our user testing also flagged this as a potentially problematic area of the site due to an interstitial that popped up on the PLP whenever the user clicked on a product. 

This interstitial contained very little additional information, so we speculated that it might have been creating unnecessary friction that was leading to the elevated dropoff rate.

In order to test this hypothesis, we created a new version of the user journey that took the user straight from the PLP to the PDP – without the interstitial.

We then ran this new version of the user journey against the original in an a/b test to see how this affected our primary KPI, number of cards sold.