Sometimes really simple things can have a big impact on conversion rates. Conversion Rate Experts, one of our Website Optimiser Certified Partners, told us how they recently almost doubled sunshine.co.uk’s revenue, an increase of £14 million year-on-year, through website optimisation. You can read all about how they did it on their website. Regardless of which industry you work in, you can learn a lot from following their process.

Knowing What To Test
What I particularly like about this case study is that it focuses on the importance of getting all the right data together before you start testing. Conversion rate optimisation is about more than testing – it is really important that we are testing the right things. Conversion Rate Experts identified what to test by surveying website visitors, usability testing and using Google Analytics.

Surveying your clients or visitors and doing usability testing regularly gives you an idea about what they want. Remember that to get the most out of Google Analytics you need to know what you want.

Of course, no analytics package will be of use to you unless you have first identified what you want your site to do and decided on key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you measure how successful you have been. For a more detailed explanation of what you should be thinking about, see this blog post from our analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik.

Always Be Testing
Recognising the importance of split-testing regularly when working on a website is key to the success of any conversion rate optimisation. It’s not easy to double the conversion rate of a site, particularly in the case of sunshine.co.uk, when conversions throughout the entire market are down. They did very well to have a 60% success rate from their A/B testing. Not all of your tests will lead to site improvements but don’t stop testing if you aren’t seeing immediate returns. Reassess what your hypotheses are - and if you need help, reach out to a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

Key Take-Aways
Here are some of the things we took from this case study:

Addressing User Concerns
Regular readers of the Conversion Room Blog will have seen a post I published back in October about the importance of speaking to the sales teams/users, finding out what the most frequently asked questions are and then answering them immediately to avoid confusion and loss of conversions. Just clarifying what made up the price details on the sunshine.co.uk site resulted in a 19% increase in conversions.

Finding the Positives
Even when you have a roadblock for your customers that you don’t have the means to change, you can still change their perception of it. For example, you may have a business that doesn’t take credit cards because the additional cost makes your prices uncompetitive. Letting your visitors know why you don’t take credit cards may help retain visitors who might have left without knowing that.

Growing Your Business
With the increase in revenue that conversion rate optimization brings for your site, don’t sit back. Continue to test improvements to your site and also reinvest the improved ROI in growing your user base. As a result of the lower cost per acquisition that comes with conversion rate improvements, you will be able to afford a greater investment in PPC advertising and affiliate programs, bringing more visitors to turn into customers.

Please do read the whole case study on the Conversion Rate Experts site as well as a Q&A they did with the team at sunshine.co.uk. Hopefully you’ll learn something that you can use to improve your own business. As sunshine.co.uk have learned, it’s well worth it.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

This post was first published in German on the the German Conversionroom blog

The air travel portal TUIfly.com is part of TUI, the world's largest tourism group. On TUIfly.com travellers can book flights to around 170 destinations in 42 countries. These include popular holiday destinations around the Mediterranean sea as well as city destinations. TUIfly.com offers flights from more than 10 airlines, including their own fleet. Conceptually and technically the TUIfly.com website is being taken care of by GCP SinnerSchrader.

In the beginning of 2009, a newly designed site was launched which is now continuously being optimized based on the wishes and behavior of visitors. The basis for this optimization is Web Analytics data and extensive A / B and multivariate testing on the site. The Web Analytics Team of SinnerSchrader leads this process of continuous improvement.

Requiring Personal details at the beginning of a booking process leads to higher exit rates
In the flight booking process, TUIfly.com offers the consumer the option to reserve seats and book extras such a specific menu or additional luggage. The selection of seats and extras and assigning these to the person(s) traveling should be as easy as possible, so the names of the passengers are required at the beginning of the booking. The visitor can then assign the seats and extras to each passenger.

An analysis of the booking process based on Web Analytics data showed that a considerable percentage of consumers abandoned the booking process early in the process when they were asked to provide passenger details. Based on this data driven insight, an A/B test was designed to reduce the percentage of consumers abandoning the checkout at this point and increase the conversion rate of TUIfly.com

A / B test
To find a better way of combining the entry of personal details with the selection of seats and booking extras the following A/B test was set up:

• In variation A (the original) the names of passengers were required before selecting seats and booking extras
• In variation B, representative names (first passenger, second passenger, ...) were used - personal details including the names of the persons traveling were not required until the end of the booking process.

During a four week testing period, visitors to the site saw one or other of these variations when going into the booking process.

Variation A


Variation B



Variation B reduces the exit rate by 25%
After four weeks, the test had delivered a conclusive result: Variation B showed a 25% lower exit rate than variation A (the original). The conversion rate (the percentage of consumers booking a flight) increased by a factor 1.01 (i.e 1%) Based on these results, variation B was implemented and is now live on TUIfly.com. Although variation A, where seats and extras are assigned to named travelers, seems to make more sense from a usability perspective the test result shows that consumers are more likely to complete a booking when personal details are not required until the end of the booking process.

What should you do next?
Important in optimizing a website (in addition to qualitative usability improvements) is carrying out a quantitative test. By simply making changes based on usability considerations, you might overlook implications that your changes have for other parts of your website as well as for the main goal(s) of your site. Run A/B or Multivariate tests with a tool like Google Website Optimizer to verify that your site improvement hypotheses really work.

SinnerSchrader is part of the Google Conversion Professional (GCP) network in Germany. If you are based in Germany, you can learn more about this program and find an expert that can help your online presence to maximize profitability. If you are based outside of Germany, there is a network of Google Analytics Certified Partners and Website Optimizer Certified Partners that can support your efforts to maximise the ROI of your website

Posted by Jos Meijerhof, Google Conversion Team and Alexander Czernay, Head of Web Analytics at SinnerSchrader