Visual Website Optimizer

Thanks for sharing your results, this is very insightful.

However, do you have any concerns about using a popup long term – particularly for SEO? From my understanding, Google may tend to ‘disfavour’ sites that collect opt-ins using a fullscreen popup.

What’s your opinion on the SEO impact of a fullscreen popup?

@Schwabe: I don’t think there are any SEO implications to this. We show popup after visitor clicks on signup button, not just after page load.

Awesome work as always Paras.

Initially, I was a bit surprised at the 50% increase. While I would totally understand a nice lift, 50% is hitting it out of the park.

After thinking about it a bit, I’d have to guess that the “forced focus” (literally removing everything but the form) is stronger than expected.

I’m kinda wondering how much impact the instant form (opposed to loading another page) has.

- Ophir Prusak

@Ophir: yep, I think “forced focus” is a big reason for this increase. So it will be interesting to see if eventual paid conversions get increased too!

The half that didn’t sign up will now assume you are a spam site though…

@Ashley: why do you think so? I am genuinely curious.

I think I agree with Ashley… this is a tactic used by Spam websites… and the abhorrent “NO CREDIT CARD REQUIRED” isn’t an encouragement eithre. It is usually a bait to get the visitor’s email ID by hook or crook, which then proceeds to get…ahem…”draped” and pillaged with spam.

@John: note that we popup the form only after visitor clicks on Start Now button, not before!

If your signup form is only two fields, why not just put that on the homepage instead of requiring people to click the button?

@Andy: yep, that’s exactly what we are going to test next!

@john I must admit any site that shouts “NO CREDIT CARD REQUIRED” is always a worry to me.

I like the idea of a simple ‘pop up’ form but perhaps simple is the key here. Cutting down on the number of fields may well have been a contributory factor here it may be worth retesting this approach but with more fields rather than email and password.

Just for sign up we can use pop up forms.

What about B2B sites where we try to capture leads?

@Gunjan: A/B test it on lead-gen sites!

What technology, specifically was used to achieve this pop-up?

BleachReport dot com does an incredible job with this feature, but not at the home page. They tailor it to pop-up after spending about 45 seconds on a team page. Then the pop-up is context sensitive.

If you were on the Ohio State Buckeyes page, then the pop-up would be to sign up for newsletter updates about the Buckeyes.

Exceptionally done.

Regarding the comments from other users about the “no credit card required” looking spammy, you guys are imposing your personal views on a website that may have a totally different demographic audience than yours. Furthermore, they are sharing a technique that has worked for them, during testing.

This page isn’t about the text in the pop-up, but the functionality used to achieve the results of the pop-up.

We used jQuery Facebox plugin for creating the popup.

Are you sure the improvements are not related to requiring E-mail + password instead of Full Name (scary) + email + password, and the bad layout of the signup form?

@Ricardo: no, not entirely sure. Didn’t isolate a lot of variables in this test.

hi,

I love reading about what worked *for you* and how you went about it.

But: what’s with the headline “how to increase signups by 50% using popup forms”? That implies that your recipe:
- relied only on the popup forms
- works for everyone, every site.

Well, it won’t! If one single approach worked, then why would we need a/b testing for a start?

As you point out, you did a lot of changes and got a good result. Excellent – I don’t want to knock that.

By now, thousands of people have read this – partly, no doubt, due to its simple, catchy headline. Exellent – I love it when people pay attention to forms design.

But really! Are we now going to have a spate of articles that say: “pop-ups will increase conversion by 50%”? Answer: probably. And will they be right? Answer: in most cases, definitely not.

At the very least, can I beg you to change your title to: “How we increased signups by 50% by using popups?”

And if you want to be really meticulous, how about “How we increased signups by 50%: using popups, lots of care, and doing a ton of testing?”

best
Caroline Jarrett

[...] How to Increase Signups with Popup Forms [...]

When I see a pop-up asking me to sign up at a website, I sometimes click the “close” option (if it is very clearly marked) and more often than not, I leave the site and never return. It’s an annoying hassle.

I’m going to try to see if I can increase comments on my blog by have a displaying a message when the viewer has reached the comment section.

Our landing page “sucks”? Conversion rate is a dismal 3%. What do we need to do to increase the percentage of email submissions?…

Start implementing A/B testing. Take the time to make several layouts, changing button positions, change text, have tests with bold calls to action. Learn from the actual data. Start finding a layout and messaging that starts to push the needle up, the…

This is to give everyone an update on my previous comment on to see if this “Pop up” form would work for my website.
Result: Successful.

More info:

My goal for this short experiment was to decrease the click/vote ratio for my articles posted on dzone.com.

After 10 days, my highest rated article received a click/vote of 270/7 = 38.6 clicks to get one vote.
But in just two days, using a pop-up message that appeared at the top of screen on, another article gave me click/vote ratio of 147/12 = 12.25 clicks to get one vote.

However, a few problems with my experiment is that I used different articles to compare results and also my small sample size.
If you disregard those two drawbacks, then I would I say this “pop-up” technique works and does provide an average of 50% increase in user involvement.

For those wondering, a popup message of “Please leave a comment before you go.(click to exit)” was displayed at the top of the screen when the user hovered over the content. The popup message was made with jquery-topbar.js.

Thanks for the article. I’m sure this site has more useful information.

@Larry: thanks for sharing that. I am glad the same technique worked for your site. Though do a proper A/B test to verify it :)

Hi Paras,

Thanks for sharing this with us.

I’ll remember to use it whenever I ask for an opt-in on the home page.

Best,

E

How would I achieve this effect using visualwebsiteoptimizer? Could I do a regular A/B test and put the jquery code in one of the variations? Or would it be better create two separate versions of the page on my own and use the Split URL test feature?

@Brandon: we used default A/B testing, so you can use that too. Contact us on support if you are not able to figure out how to do it, will be glad to help.

[...] combined with a short form, using a modal window can increase signups by 50% or more (as it did for Visual Website Optimizer). The modal window also has the benefit of decreasing distractions on the signup page, as it shades [...]

Some of you guys aren’t getting it. It DOESN’T MATTER what you think – really. What matters is what most people who visit the site think, and, not what you THINK they think! :-)

That’s why you should A/B test instead of “thinking.”

A/B Test, scrub, rinse, repeat.

Have you also tested offering some kind of incentive along with your offer? Example: a free ebook (as long as it’s relevant).

I’ve been noticing more companies using this technique. For example, Citrix is using a book by Jill Konrath (a real, published book, in pdf format) as the incentive.

Thoughts?

@John: giving stuff away for free in order to incentivize people signing up for trial is an interesting strategy. But I think it incentivizes people in a wrong way — we want people to be motivated to try out the product because of its potential usefulness. With a freebie such as a book, people may signup just because of book and may ignore the application completely. But, again, it’s a hypothesis — real answer can be found after A/B testing it.

Hi being working in b2b industory, the tast that i have been assigned is to increase sign ups, recently we have practices of pope-up to sign ups and it works great.. can you please suggest me any other ideas which could increase our sign ups…

Thanks

[...] Notice what happens when the user clicks on the big blue button: The email popup window on Visual Website Optimizer’s home page is initiated by the user. This offers a very different user experience than does the popup that startles the user when it appears “out of nowhere”. Interestingly, Visual Website Optimizer experienced a 50% increase in sign ups when they implemented this user-initiated email popup form versus the user going to a separate page to sign up—read the full article here. [...]

[...] Use popup sign-up forms. Popups are known to boost email subscriptions, but Visual Website Optimizer got 50% more signups thanks to a popup signup form. [...]

[...] How to increase signups by 50% using “popup forms” This increased signups somewhat but the real game-changer was the following change. [...]

[...] but proven to increase subscribers (Visual Website Optimizer found a 50% increase in sign-ups). I personally loathe the pop-up so make sure to consider how much you may be turning off some of [...]

What about A/B testing the actual popup. For example, testing the popup headline or seeing if you can add another field to the popup.

Have you tried this? Would it be possible if the popup was JavaScript and didn’t have it’s own unique URL to run a split test with?

Would love to hear your thoughts on how this could be accomplished :)

@Jon: yes, we should have tried optimizing the popup itself. We can test JavaScript popups using VWO advanced capabilities (JavaScript and jQuery based API), but we haven’t gotten around testing it yet.

[...] myśli o formularzu sign-up, przychodzi nam do głowy nowa podstrona naszego serwisu. Jak pokazują testy Visual Website Optimizer, często lepiej jest pokazać użytkownikowi toplayer, niż przekiero…. Visual Website Optimizer zastosował toplayer zamiast przekierowania uzytkownika na kolejną [...]

50% increase in sign ups is really awesome, i’d agree it’s probably because the rest of the page is blacked out so it’s really clear what to do. A lot of websites are so packed full of buttons, graphics, offers and info it can be difficult to know where to go and what to click on! The key is to keep things simple!

Hi guys! May I propose you another one variant for testing your 30 Days Free Trial proposition derived from my usecase? ;)

I am interested in your service, but not right now. So I delayed signing up for free trial until we launch my startup (planned for end of July 2012). But in July I may not remember your URL and, choosing the service provider for multivariant and A/B testing, can choose another one.

So you can try to offer to sifn up for free trial, but ask users when they want to start their 30 days free trial (and tell them they can delay this date later). So you can aquire more interested customers and communicate with them via e-mail with your use cases until they start to use your services.