Case Study: Universal Technical Institute Increases Application Requests Eight-fold With Website Optimizer

Wednesday, March 09, 2011 3/09/2011 02:28:00 PM

UTI revved up their conversion rate with Google Website Optimizer. By conducting rigorous testing, making design improvements to their landing pages, and increasing AdWords investment to capitalize on their higher conversion rates, UTI cut their cost-per-application request in half and increased their request volume by more than 700% in in marketing campaigns that used the new landing pages. Read more to learn how they did it!

Since 1965, Universal Technical Institute has helped automotive enthusiasts turn their passions into careers. Offering programs in Automotive, Diesel, Collision, and Motorcycle Repair, as well as courses to become a Marine or NASCAR technician, UTI has trained more than 140,000 professionals in the automotive industry. Today, UTI operates 11 campuses, and currently has more than 15,000 students that are working with their hands to learn career skills that will last a lifetime.

The Goal: Improve Conversion Rates Through Website Optimization

UTI has been an AdWords advertiser since 2004. After years of fine-tuning their search campaigns, and successful investments in Display, Mobile, and YouTube, UTI was looking for their next big avenue of growth. After doing some research - they realized the opportunity was right in front of them, on their own site! With the help of Website Optimizer, UTI tested different calls-to-action, images, videos, buttons, and button placements. After many different landing page combinations, they ultimately settled on a winner.

The Results: A Great-looking Landing Page and a 300% Increase in Conversion Rate

UTI's new landing page was a dramatic departure from their previous landing page. Most notable is their use of “gradual engagement” - asking for user’s information in several steps rather than showing an intimidating 15-field sign-up form.

Original landing page (click to see full size)

New landing page (click to see full size)

“Prospective Students responded extremely well to our new landing pages,” said Loring Kohrt, Online Marketing Manager for UTI, “not only did we triple our conversion rate, we reduced our exit rate and saw a boost in site engagement metrics across the board.”

More Good News: The Effect on Advertising

The jump in conversion volume was substantial and immediate, but UTI didn’t stop there. Realizing that their increased conversion rates had dramatically lowered their cost-per-lead, UTI decided that they had room to bid much more aggressively on Google’s Search and Display Networks. By doing so, they increased their average position, and brought in eight times the conversions at about half the CPA!

Improving conversion rate amplified all other marketing activities

Reflecting on his experience, Mr. Kohrt said “We are tremendously happy with the results of our redesign. We were able to dramatically improve the profitability of our advertising, increase our enrollments, and deliver a better experience to potential students.”

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team

​How to quadruple a conversion rate

Monday, February 01, 2010 2/01/2010 11:06:00 AM

We’re big fans of increasing conversion rates. The bigger the increase, the happier we are. So we were delighted when Conversion Rate Experts, one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants, told us how they recently quadrupled Voices.com’s conversion rate from under 5% to 22%.

You can read all about how they did it on their website, which I strongly encourage you to do. Come back after you’ve finished reading. We’ll wait.

OK, done reading? You probably got some great ideas on what you can do to improve your site.

Here’s CRE’s summation of key lessons:

• Find out why customers aren’t converting; don’t just guess. If you don’t know what their objections are, your chances of overcoming them are very slim.
  
  
• Don’t “hide your light under a bushel.” If your company is the best at something—and if you have proof—make certain the proof is prominently placed on your website.
  
  
• Consider segmenting your visitors. How do you know whether to segment visitors? If your most common “visitor intentions” can’t be addressed with the same message, you should segment them. Similarly, if you have more than one type of visitor, and they can’t all be served by the same message, you’ll probably have to segment them. Beware that segmentation can create a lot of extra work, so only do it if you absolutely have to.
  
  
• People don’t buy what they don’t understand. Clearly explain your service, so the prospect is more likely to feel in control and take action.
  
  
• Sometimes video is the best medium for explaining things—and for providing proof. Web video needn’t cost a lot, as we’ll reveal soon (subscribe to our newsletter to receive details). Screen capture videos can easily be carried out using Camtasia (for PC) or Screenflow (which is our preferred option for Mac).
  

The Big Lesson

For me, the biggest lesson from this story is that quadrupling a conversion rate is hard work. Let’s break this up a bit:

Know your (client’s) customer

CRE has a lot of experience in improving websites, but the first thing they did was work to understand the customer. They ran surveys, they spoke with the Voices.com CEO, they dug deep into the web analytics, all to find out what customers were thinking when they visited the website.

Time and again, the greatest conversion rate increases I’ve seen have come from a better understanding of the customer. So, take the time to really get inside your customers’ heads.

Avoid the Spaghetti Strategy

If you want to radically increase your conversion rate, you can’t just throw up a test with two new images and three new headlines like pieces of spaghetti and hope that they stick. You need to put thought into how you can improve conversion rate, and you need to know your customer.

Don’t stop at the first test

Conversion Rate Experts didn’t go from 5% to 22% with one test. It wasn’t two, three, or even five tests. The 400% increase is the result of 11 tests. Maybe more importantly, these tests spanned the entire conversion funnel and didn’t just focus on the landing pages. By continuing to learn more about the customer and methodical testing, CRE achieved great results. Testing isn't a one time thing, and it takes a few iterations to get the biggest wins.

It may be hard work, but as Voices.com's results show, it’s worth the effort.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team

New video: How We Used Data to Win the Election

Monday, November 16, 2009 11/16/2009 02:58:00 PM

We just posted a new video on the Website Optimizer YouTube channel that shows the power of website testing. Last month, we held our annual Google Partner Summit where we hosted all of the Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, and Urchin Software Authorized Consultants. One of the keynote speakers was Dan Siroker, Director of Analytics for the Obama Presidential campaign.

In his 50 minute talk, Dan explained how they used data to win the election. He shows how they used tools like Google Analytics and Website Optimizer to get more engagement and more donations. He also describes the lessons that they learned throughout the campaign. With the successful election behind him, Dan is now focused on his startup, CarrotSticks, and he explains how he's using the same principles within his own company.

Special thanks to Kobi Reiter, Website Optimizer engineer, for his steady hand in recording this video.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team

Using Website Optimizer with Google Analytics - Case Study with Catalogs.com

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 10/27/2009 09:54:00 AM

The following is a guest post from Julie Ferrara-Brown, Director of Quantitative Analysis for WebShare. WebShare is one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants. The case focuses on exploring more than just a single conversion.

Often, optimizing a site means more than optimizing for a single conversion. Understanding how your test pages and sections affect bounce rate, ecommerce revenue, time on site, and all the other metrics provided by Google Analytics can be even more useful than a single conversion rate in painting a picture of how your site is used.

Good news! You can use Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics together to open up a whole new world of optimization and testing for your site.

A Single Conversion is Not Enough

Catalogs.com worked with WebShare, a Google Analytics & Website Optimizer Authorized Consultancy, to plan and run a test that integrated both tools to collect and analyze a wealth of data. With a number of different monetization paths, the Catalogs.com website wanted to know not only whether alternative versions increase overall conversions, but also what impact would these versions have on specific types of conversions and the revenue associated with them.

During this test, while Website Optimizer as a standalone tool was able to show that overall conversions had increased by 6.8%, the integration with Google Analytics showed much more granular and relevant improvements:

• Specifically, catalog orders rose by almost 11%
• Total revenue from all conversion types was up 7.4%

“It’s great to know that the changes we tested gave us an increase in our overall conversions, but all of our different conversion actions are not equal in terms of the revenue they bring in,” explains Matt Craine of Catalogs.com. “It’s possible that the increase in overall conversion rate could actually lose us money because it was due to a design enticing visitors toward a low value conversion at the expense of our higher value actions.”

Setting up the Test

The aim of this experiment was to test different layouts across all of the sites’ merchant pages. The experiment was set up as a single variable, four-state MVT, encompassing every one of these merchant pages.

Three variations were created, and each merchant page was available in one of its three formats by using different file extensions (.alpha, .beta, and .gamma). The test variable was actually just a piece of script that controlled which version of merchant pages a visitor would see.

Running the Analysis – Website Optimizer

Over the course of a few weeks, almost 70,000 unique visitors participated in the experiment and performed almost 30,000 overall conversion actions. We could see in the Website Optimizer experiment reports that we had found a winner in the Beta version:

This, however, simply told us that Beta was more likely to result in a conversion, regardless of type or associated revenue. Enter Google Analytics.

Getting Additional Data From Google Analytics

In this case, the easiest way to see the Google Analytics data for each variation is by using Advanced Segments. Since each template had its own extension, we can create an advanced segment that matches the “Page” dimension with a specific extension. The result is that the segment will only include data for sessions that included a pageview on one or more pages that matched that condition. Below is an example for the Alpha variation:

After creating a segment for each of the variations, it’s simply a matter of applying those segments to any report in Google Analytics and setting the appropriate date range. Now we can see, side-by-side, data for all the variations in any of Google Analytics’ reports.

Running the Numbers

As an analytics platform (and not a testing platform), Google Analytics was not designed to perform the necessary statistical analysis to evaluate this data, but with the numbers it provides, you can perform an enormous amount of offline analysis. Let’s take the case of the bottom line, be-all, end-all metric: Total Revenue.

For all the statisticians out there, in this particular case an F test blocked by day was performed to compare means. The results can be seen in the following analysis.

What this boils down to is that circles that do not overlap or barely overlap represent a significant difference, and in this case the Beta variation is statistically our best variation in terms of generating revenue.

Why Look at Lots of Metrics?

Although we’ve only shown revenue analysis here, it’s important to note that performing this kind of analysis on a number of different metrics can really help you understand your visitors and their experience.

For example, during this test we also found that the Beta version (the version that provided more conversions, more high value conversions, and more revenue) also had the worst bounce rate!

Just because a visitor doesn't leave a site from the first page they land on does not mean they are going to convert.

Get Integrated!

Depending upon your test type and implementation, there are a number of different ways to integrate Website Optimizer experiments with Google Analytics, and hopefully this post has helped to demonstrate the power of having all that wonderful data available in your testing.

“Looking at a puzzle piece by itself is a good way to start toward a solution, but it doesn’t tell you the full story,” says Catalogs.com owner Leslie Linevsky. “Putting all those pieces together shows me how small changes are impacting my business as a whole.”

Thanks to WebShare and Catalogs.com for sharing this case study.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team