Three Ships is a marketing agency dedicated to driving growth for its partners. Their multifaceted approach spans affiliate marketing, performance-driven content, conversion rate optimization, and media investment management.
Three Ships teamed up with AB Tasty to accelerate growth for its partners through experimentation. By thinking critically about the connection between user intent, device, and UX design, they were able to increase visits to partner pages by 7%. Here’s how they did it.
The Situation
Mattress Advisor is a comprehensive resource for shoppers looking to purchase a new bed— complete with user reviews, product guides, and general resources on all things sleep-related. The Three Ships team wanted to focus on Mattress Advisor’s branded pages, which featured only one mattress brand (as opposed to comparing multiple, like on non-branded pages).
The goal was to get users to click on the CTA (“Buy Now”), which would send shoppers to the brand’s own page to complete the conversion.
Three Ships knew that visitors to Mattress Advisor’s branded pages had a strong intent (incoming traffic was via paid search links, meaning shoppers had used brand-specific keywords in their search). These shoppers were nearing the end of their research, had a specific mattress in mind, and were closing in on a purchase decision.
In analyzing this website traffic further, Three Ships saw that roughly two-thirds of visitors were using mobile devices. So, optimizing the CTA had to consider both the stage in the customer journey and mobile usability (e.g. smaller screen sizes, the role of touch in the user experience).
The Experiment
Three Ships used an AB Tasty banner widget to place a sticky CTA at the bottom of the screen and duplicated this test across all branded pages.
The idea was that a sticky CTA would be easily accessible to visitors on mobile devices without blocking important information like reviews and ratings that often influence decision-making.
Results
It only took two weeks for this experiment to reach statistical significance due to the high traffic of these pages.
In the end, the sticky CTA across branded mobile pages was a success, with the conversion rate averaging at about 7%. It’s since been hard-coded onto the site.
Takeaway Tip
Mattresses are big purchases with long periods between return customers. It’s important to find a balance between encouraging a conversion while not coming across as too pushy. In this scenario, Three Ships knew that visitors were close to making a purchase. So, it was important that taking the next step to convert was easily accessible while not overtaking the entire web page. Implementing this experiment was simple, fast, and scalable thanks to AB Tasty’s widget library. No developer support was needed to create the sticky CTA, and it took only two weeks to prove its effectiveness.
