6 ms·

How We Increased Our Conversion Rate By 311%

91 points by stevenklein 13y ago

rglover 13y ago
Good tips, thanks. Do you have any resources that you learned from? Trying to improve on this, too.
- stevenklein 13y ago
  Haha oh god so many. Google startup metrics for pirates, check these out http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/clients-and-results/#clienttestimonials http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/clients-and-results/#..., sign up for this https://segment.io/academy/ https://segment.io/academy/, read these http://blog.kissmetrics.com/topics/conversion/ http://blog.kissmetrics.com/topics/conversion/. Now that you mention it, putting together a huge directory of this content might be valuable.
  - rglover 13y ago
    Thanks, appreciate it.
coldcode 13y ago
What a strange world we live in, there is a business that lets other businesses point out that their business is not doing business sometimes.
- outericky 13y ago
  But it's hosted in a different location. So if said business is offline, you won't know why. An offsite location, with backup sites will still stand. Also, it's not really for people to know... it's for people who depend on it, like API sites. As an app that uses, say Balanced or Stripe, I'd want to know when, why and for how long they are down. So their status is important to me.
stevenklein 13y ago
Would be happy to elaborate on any of these points if you have any questions.
- tlogan 13y ago
  Do you guys measure/optimize on "traffic to revenue" or just "traffic to paid"? Does these two measurements have different optimization techniques? Also, it would be great to learn about how do you generate top of the funnel. As patio11 said there is an "arms race" on that front and I wonder what do you that on that front.
  - stevenklein 13y ago
    If I understand your question correctly, you're asking if we optimize for traffic -> any plan vs. traffic -> total revenue? Right now it's pretty unsophisticated and we're not really measuring/optimizing on getting people to select a higher plan vs. a lower plan. I'm sure as we nail more of the basics down this is something we'll focus on in the future though. Generating top of the funnel is actually really hard and something we struggle with a lot. Writing blog posts and posting them on Hacker News (like this one here) result in huge bumps of traffic but it's not really scalable. We added a small "powered by statuspage.io" at the bottom of every status page and are going to do more SEO-minded blog posts. For early stage startups where there isn't already much of a market (there aren't a lot of companies doing status pages as a service), a lot of traffic and eventual customers come in via word-of-mouth. We have some plans to really give our customers an amazing experience with our product and company as a whole with the hope that it will get people talking about us. Do a google search for karma based marketing - Colin from Customer.io does an amazing job getting people talking about his company.
    - tlogan 13y ago
      Thanks! One more question: I like your https://www.statuspage.io/series-t https://www.statuspage.io/series-t page. Is there a service which does everything for you or do you guys process this?
ape4 13y ago
So statuspage.io displays of a another site is up, down, etc? I don't get it. If you want something outside your company to do this, get regular webhosting plan from an ISP.
- lsjroberts 13y ago
  I guess the benefit here is they host on 3 different AWS regions, and provide a nice interface and admin cms.
- robryan 13y ago
  I can see the benefit. It is a totally different architecture to your service. Meaning no chance that the thing that brings down your service is shared by you services servers and the server running your status page.
recuter 13y ago
<a very small amount> increased by "311%" is still a <very small amount>, this is a way to oversell numbers, imho. The rest of the article is not bad, shame about the title.
- coherentpony 13y ago
  Amen. Percentages are how to entice fools.
  - tghw 13y ago
    Did you know over 1,000,000 people in the US have top secret clearance? That's a huge number! Or it's ~0.3% of the population. That's a tiny number! It really depends on context.
    - coherentpony 13y ago
      Did you know that about 0.3% of the US population has top secret clearance? That's a tiny number. But about 0.01% of the world population have US top secret clearance? Woah, that's even tinier.
- stevenklein 13y ago
  I definitely agree that the actual conversion rate of traffic to paid user is low -- we're hoping to get that number up to around 1% some day. I wouldn't say it's misleading though since we did actually triple the visit to paid conversion rate.
  - badclient 13y ago
    He is not saying much about your actual conversion rate. He is saying more that you don't have enough data to make the claim in the title. For example, imagine if your conversion rate was 0. Then one day you got a few sales. If someone made a post claiming 10,000+% increase in ROI, we'd be pretty appalled.
  - timr 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Jackstone 13y ago
.136% to .424% is a 211% increase.
danaw 13y ago
By having a server error page? Seems a strange strategy.
benologist 13y ago
How We Increased Our Traffic Rate By Writing Ads For HN.
nhebb 13y ago
I would rename their "Hobby" plan. It's condescending. People don't pay ~$240 / yr to have a status page for a hobby site.
- giovannibajo1 13y ago
  Seconded.
- waleedka 13y ago
  That's probably intentional. A lot of people would buy the higher plan simply to avoid buying the "hobby" plan.
- jonny_eh 13y ago
  I've seen businesses choose a plan up from a perfectly good lower run plan simply because the name of it was something like "Solo" and didn't think it fit. It's just clever marketing to anchor people towards the middle.
  - nhebb 13y ago
    Unless they actually don't want customers in the lower tier, I think they could channel customers to the middle tier without insulting potential lower tier customers. They could call it the Solo plan, Micro plan, Bootstrapper plan, or even Lil' 'Strapper plan and come off as less insulting. I doubt they were purposely trying to insult anyone, but with a thousand roadblocks to growth, knocking down one of them by changing a plan name seems like a quick win.
- patio11 13y ago
  I routinely give out "Call the low plan 'Hobby'" advice. Here's why: a) Price-sensitive customers with side businesses often either affirmatively identify of hobbyists (I would have said that about myself for the first 5 years of my business -- at which point $20 a month would have made it somewhere around the 10th most expensive thing I was buying, by the way) or are willing to buy it without thinking too much about the name. b) At larger customers, there are social reasons to avoid putting Hobby on a purchasing card / requisition form / etc where one does not have any technical/quota/etc objections against the lowest-tier plan. I've told the following anecdote two dozen times but it's still good: I was once instructed by a boss to get CrazyEgg set up. We were in the $9 a month Hobbyist tier. I put in a requisition for it and he redlined the Hobbyist and price, went to the pricing page, and picked the Enterprise tier (at $500 at the time, IIRC). When I pointed out that I was intimately familiar with the numbers and sure we could make do with Hobbyist, he said (translated loosely from the Japanese) "Eff if I'm going to pass a request for Hobbyist services to [my boss]." c) See the anecdote above? I can tell you the anecdote. I can't show you the data. But trust me, the anecdote has scaled for companies before.
mikelinington 13y ago
For what it's worth, we did the free premium trial in June. Over 14 days, we received 11 emails from the folks at StatusPage--some about getting started, some (too many) just their regular email blasts, some to say our trial was ending. Eight of these offered an unsubscribe link, which is appreciated, but the default should not be to spam the shit out of potential customers. I know I've seen other threads on HN and elsewhere about finding the "right" number of emails to inundate your trial users with, so I hope you guys are experimenting with this and tracking what works and what's turning people off. Still, seems like a solid product that does what it says, and overall we didn't convert because we already had a solution in place that we're comfortable with. Good luck.
- stevenklein 13y ago
  Haha yeah we used to send waaaay to many emails. We're now down to 6 over 20 days. Sorry for being overbearing the first time around. When we personally reach out, there isn't an unsubscribe link but as far as I know, all of our automated emails have them. Email is something we definitely need to experiment with more. It can be an amazing tool when used for good. Thanks for the feedback.
  - omarchowdhury 13y ago
    If you want to see email done right, check out PerfectAudience's flow.
    - stevenklein 13y ago
      Will do thanks for the tip!
    - brandnewlow 13y ago
      Wow. Thanks. After hours of doing battle with spreadsheets, reading this made my night. I'm going to pass this along to the team!
- outericky 13y ago
  As young startups, we all seek engagement and feedback. So we may overreach because we want someone to acknowledge and respond. One way to get fewer emails from a startup -- respond and provide feedback. They really want to improve the service and best serve you. Startups listen and accommodate. Big companies just send canned emails.
cpursley 13y ago
What javascripty thing are you using for "Just ask xyz" copy?
- stevenklein 13y ago
  This guy http://cosmos.layervault.com/typer-js.html http://cosmos.layervault.com/typer-js.html
  - cpursley 13y ago
    Thanks! I'm gonna' use this. Also - what are you using for the moving status page below highlighting features? That's clever. P.S. - did you also try A/B testing the copy, layout, etc.
    - stevenklein 13y ago
      That's just a little custom thing I made myself with JS/CSS.
khalidmbajwa 13y ago
The demos of your app on your site are pretty slick. What are those ? Simple Gifs or is there some other fancy sorcery going on in there ? PS: i would really like a way to control the playback of these demos. I would mostly arrive when they had already started and frustrated would move on.
- stevenklein 13y ago
  The thing that shows off the different parts of the actual status pages is just a big screenshot with explanations controlled with some JS/CSS. The Creating and Managing Your Page section is actually HTML5 controlled videos.
rlocke 13y ago
Thanks for sharing! At the risk of sounding pedantic, your increase was actually 211%: (0.424 - 0.136)/0.136 = 2.117 (so 212% actually) (Increasing something by 100% is doubling it, 200% is tripling it, so on and so forth.) But to everyone saying he's overselling, if the title had said he tripled his revenue, would you say the same thing? This is a huge accomplishment no matter how you slice it!
rlwolfcastle 13y ago
But what do I do if I want to increase my conversion rate by 312 %?
adrianhoward 13y ago
"For us, there was so much low hanging fruit in watching a bunch of people check out our marketing site. I suspect there's a good amount of diminishing returns there, but if you've never done it, the value you get out of it is tremendous." I'd strongly suggest that you keep doing actual tests with customers until you actually see diminishing returns. I've regularly seen people think they've fixed all of the big problems - then see another N rounds of "low hanging fruit" appear ;-) The insights and improvements you get from doing usability testing are very different from the ones that you get through optimisation via a/b testing. Each can inform the other. Keep doing both until you find you get no value. I suspect that you'll find that you keep getting significantly useful results if you keep it up.
efm 13y ago
I couldn't figure out why pricing was dependent on number of users. Who are the users? How do I know how many I will have? Do I have any control over who they are? But most of all, why is this thing tied to that at all?
SpookSEO 13y ago
One of the best things that worked for me when increasing conversion rates is to remove all the distractions that's on the page. To do this, you first need to define what that specific page's goal is (whether it's to have the visitors purchase, share, sign-up, etc...). It'll work remarkably better if you only have 1 goal per page. From there, you need to look for the things that will distract your visitors from doing that specific goal. It could be the images, an even better content, even the social sharing buttons, etc...

91 points by stevenklein 13y ago

rglover 13y ago

Good tips, thanks. Do you have any resources that you learned from? Trying to improve on this, too.

stevenklein 13y ago
Haha oh god so many. Google startup metrics for pirates, check these out http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/clients-and-results/#clienttestimonials http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/clients-and-results/#..., sign up for this https://segment.io/academy/ https://segment.io/academy/, read these http://blog.kissmetrics.com/topics/conversion/ http://blog.kissmetrics.com/topics/conversion/. Now that you mention it, putting together a huge directory of this content might be valuable.
- rglover 13y ago
  Thanks, appreciate it.

coldcode 13y ago

What a strange world we live in, there is a business that lets other businesses point out that their business is not doing business sometimes.

outericky 13y ago
But it's hosted in a different location. So if said business is offline, you won't know why. An offsite location, with backup sites will still stand. Also, it's not really for people to know... it's for people who depend on it, like API sites. As an app that uses, say Balanced or Stripe, I'd want to know when, why and for how long they are down. So their status is important to me.

stevenklein 13y ago

Would be happy to elaborate on any of these points if you have any questions.

tlogan 13y ago
Do you guys measure/optimize on "traffic to revenue" or just "traffic to paid"? Does these two measurements have different optimization techniques? Also, it would be great to learn about how do you generate top of the funnel. As patio11 said there is an "arms race" on that front and I wonder what do you that on that front.
- stevenklein 13y ago
  If I understand your question correctly, you're asking if we optimize for traffic -> any plan vs. traffic -> total revenue? Right now it's pretty unsophisticated and we're not really measuring/optimizing on getting people to select a higher plan vs. a lower plan. I'm sure as we nail more of the basics down this is something we'll focus on in the future though. Generating top of the funnel is actually really hard and something we struggle with a lot. Writing blog posts and posting them on Hacker News (like this one here) result in huge bumps of traffic but it's not really scalable. We added a small "powered by statuspage.io" at the bottom of every status page and are going to do more SEO-minded blog posts. For early stage startups where there isn't already much of a market (there aren't a lot of companies doing status pages as a service), a lot of traffic and eventual customers come in via word-of-mouth. We have some plans to really give our customers an amazing experience with our product and company as a whole with the hope that it will get people talking about us. Do a google search for karma based marketing - Colin from Customer.io does an amazing job getting people talking about his company.
  - tlogan 13y ago
    Thanks! One more question: I like your https://www.statuspage.io/series-t https://www.statuspage.io/series-t page. Is there a service which does everything for you or do you guys process this?

ape4 13y ago

So statuspage.io displays of a another site is up, down, etc? I don't get it. If you want something outside your company to do this, get regular webhosting plan from an ISP.

lsjroberts 13y ago
I guess the benefit here is they host on 3 different AWS regions, and provide a nice interface and admin cms.
robryan 13y ago
I can see the benefit. It is a totally different architecture to your service. Meaning no chance that the thing that brings down your service is shared by you services servers and the server running your status page.

recuter 13y ago

<a very small amount> increased by "311%" is still a <very small amount>, this is a way to oversell numbers, imho. The rest of the article is not bad, shame about the title.

coherentpony 13y ago
Amen. Percentages are how to entice fools.
- tghw 13y ago
  Did you know over 1,000,000 people in the US have top secret clearance? That's a huge number! Or it's ~0.3% of the population. That's a tiny number! It really depends on context.
  - coherentpony 13y ago
    Did you know that about 0.3% of the US population has top secret clearance? That's a tiny number. But about 0.01% of the world population have US top secret clearance? Woah, that's even tinier.
stevenklein 13y ago
I definitely agree that the actual conversion rate of traffic to paid user is low -- we're hoping to get that number up to around 1% some day. I wouldn't say it's misleading though since we did actually triple the visit to paid conversion rate.
- badclient 13y ago
  He is not saying much about your actual conversion rate. He is saying more that you don't have enough data to make the claim in the title. For example, imagine if your conversion rate was 0. Then one day you got a few sales. If someone made a post claiming 10,000+% increase in ROI, we'd be pretty appalled.
- timr 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Jackstone 13y ago

.136% to .424% is a 211% increase.

danaw 13y ago

By having a server error page? Seems a strange strategy.

benologist 13y ago

How We Increased Our Traffic Rate By Writing Ads For HN.

nhebb 13y ago

I would rename their "Hobby" plan. It's condescending. People don't pay ~$240 / yr to have a status page for a hobby site.

giovannibajo1 13y ago
Seconded.
waleedka 13y ago
That's probably intentional. A lot of people would buy the higher plan simply to avoid buying the "hobby" plan.
jonny_eh 13y ago
I've seen businesses choose a plan up from a perfectly good lower run plan simply because the name of it was something like "Solo" and didn't think it fit. It's just clever marketing to anchor people towards the middle.
- nhebb 13y ago
  Unless they actually don't want customers in the lower tier, I think they could channel customers to the middle tier without insulting potential lower tier customers. They could call it the Solo plan, Micro plan, Bootstrapper plan, or even Lil' 'Strapper plan and come off as less insulting. I doubt they were purposely trying to insult anyone, but with a thousand roadblocks to growth, knocking down one of them by changing a plan name seems like a quick win.
patio11 13y ago
I routinely give out "Call the low plan 'Hobby'" advice. Here's why: a) Price-sensitive customers with side businesses often either affirmatively identify of hobbyists (I would have said that about myself for the first 5 years of my business -- at which point $20 a month would have made it somewhere around the 10th most expensive thing I was buying, by the way) or are willing to buy it without thinking too much about the name. b) At larger customers, there are social reasons to avoid putting Hobby on a purchasing card / requisition form / etc where one does not have any technical/quota/etc objections against the lowest-tier plan. I've told the following anecdote two dozen times but it's still good: I was once instructed by a boss to get CrazyEgg set up. We were in the $9 a month Hobbyist tier. I put in a requisition for it and he redlined the Hobbyist and price, went to the pricing page, and picked the Enterprise tier (at $500 at the time, IIRC). When I pointed out that I was intimately familiar with the numbers and sure we could make do with Hobbyist, he said (translated loosely from the Japanese) "Eff if I'm going to pass a request for Hobbyist services to [my boss]." c) See the anecdote above? I can tell you the anecdote. I can't show you the data. But trust me, the anecdote has scaled for companies before.

mikelinington 13y ago

For what it's worth, we did the free premium trial in June. Over 14 days, we received 11 emails from the folks at StatusPage--some about getting started, some (too many) just their regular email blasts, some to say our trial was ending. Eight of these offered an unsubscribe link, which is appreciated, but the default should not be to spam the shit out of potential customers. I know I've seen other threads on HN and elsewhere about finding the "right" number of emails to inundate your trial users with, so I hope you guys are experimenting with this and tracking what works and what's turning people off. Still, seems like a solid product that does what it says, and overall we didn't convert because we already had a solution in place that we're comfortable with. Good luck.

stevenklein 13y ago
Haha yeah we used to send waaaay to many emails. We're now down to 6 over 20 days. Sorry for being overbearing the first time around. When we personally reach out, there isn't an unsubscribe link but as far as I know, all of our automated emails have them. Email is something we definitely need to experiment with more. It can be an amazing tool when used for good. Thanks for the feedback.
- omarchowdhury 13y ago
  If you want to see email done right, check out PerfectAudience's flow.
  - stevenklein 13y ago
    Will do thanks for the tip!
  - brandnewlow 13y ago
    Wow. Thanks. After hours of doing battle with spreadsheets, reading this made my night. I'm going to pass this along to the team!
outericky 13y ago
As young startups, we all seek engagement and feedback. So we may overreach because we want someone to acknowledge and respond. One way to get fewer emails from a startup -- respond and provide feedback. They really want to improve the service and best serve you. Startups listen and accommodate. Big companies just send canned emails.

cpursley 13y ago

What javascripty thing are you using for "Just ask xyz" copy?

stevenklein 13y ago
This guy http://cosmos.layervault.com/typer-js.html http://cosmos.layervault.com/typer-js.html
- cpursley 13y ago
  Thanks! I'm gonna' use this. Also - what are you using for the moving status page below highlighting features? That's clever. P.S. - did you also try A/B testing the copy, layout, etc.
  - stevenklein 13y ago
    That's just a little custom thing I made myself with JS/CSS.

khalidmbajwa 13y ago

The demos of your app on your site are pretty slick. What are those ? Simple Gifs or is there some other fancy sorcery going on in there ? PS: i would really like a way to control the playback of these demos. I would mostly arrive when they had already started and frustrated would move on.

stevenklein 13y ago
The thing that shows off the different parts of the actual status pages is just a big screenshot with explanations controlled with some JS/CSS. The Creating and Managing Your Page section is actually HTML5 controlled videos.

rlocke 13y ago

Thanks for sharing! At the risk of sounding pedantic, your increase was actually 211%: (0.424 - 0.136)/0.136 = 2.117 (so 212% actually) (Increasing something by 100% is doubling it, 200% is tripling it, so on and so forth.) But to everyone saying he's overselling, if the title had said he tripled his revenue, would you say the same thing? This is a huge accomplishment no matter how you slice it!

rlwolfcastle 13y ago

But what do I do if I want to increase my conversion rate by 312 %?

adrianhoward 13y ago

"For us, there was so much low hanging fruit in watching a bunch of people check out our marketing site. I suspect there's a good amount of diminishing returns there, but if you've never done it, the value you get out of it is tremendous." I'd strongly suggest that you keep doing actual tests with customers until you actually see diminishing returns. I've regularly seen people think they've fixed all of the big problems - then see another N rounds of "low hanging fruit" appear ;-) The insights and improvements you get from doing usability testing are very different from the ones that you get through optimisation via a/b testing. Each can inform the other. Keep doing both until you find you get no value. I suspect that you'll find that you keep getting significantly useful results if you keep it up.

efm 13y ago

I couldn't figure out why pricing was dependent on number of users. Who are the users? How do I know how many I will have? Do I have any control over who they are? But most of all, why is this thing tied to that at all?

SpookSEO 13y ago

One of the best things that worked for me when increasing conversion rates is to remove all the distractions that's on the page. To do this, you first need to define what that specific page's goal is (whether it's to have the visitors purchase, share, sign-up, etc...). It'll work remarkably better if you only have 1 goal per page. From there, you need to look for the things that will distract your visitors from doing that specific goal. It could be the images, an even better content, even the social sharing buttons, etc...