Judy’s Book Sees 198% Increase in Engagement with Simple Code Edit

Background

Judy’s Book is a reviews website that caters to a family audience. After reading an article in WIRED about Optimizely, Ali Alami, GM and Acting CEO of Judy’s Book got started with the tool because it allowed his small team to maximize their resources.

“At board meetings, there are many ideas on strategy and features like, ‘so and so is doing this, let’s try it,'” Ali says. “Rather than going off hunches and just doing it, our leadership understands the need to validate. We can quickly test ideas and let the numbers speak for themselves.”

Challenge and Goal

Paid business listings are a primary way Judy’s Book makes money. Businesses get better search positioning, more robust profiles with photos if they pay a monthly fee. While they also offer a free listing, Judy’s Book wanted to increase the number of businesses who sign up for paid listings. The form to sign up for a free listing was a bit hidden due to the thought that if people saw a free listing, they wouldn’t want to pay for one.

Ali and his team wanted to optimize the pricing page to drive more businesses to sign up for paid listings.

Hypothesis

Ali thought that positioning a column highlighting the features included with a free listing alongside the paid listings might lead more people to sign up for paid listings. Since the features included with a free listing are very limited, Ali had a feeling that visually showing the comparison of features that come with a free versus a paid listing would convince visitors to sign up for the paid listings.

Solution

One of the engineers at Judy’s Book appended the original code with a simple change to add space for a new column. Ali copied and pasted the new code into the “edit code” section in Optimizely’s editorand it immediately deployed the new version of the listing breakdowns.

For them, success meant increasing the overall engagement on the pricing page. Optimizely by default tracks engagement, or the number of clicks each variation page receives. By easily setting up click goals on every sign up button on the page, Judy’s Book measured engagement specifically on each button. They ran the experiment through Optimizely for a month to ensure statistically significant results.

Original

Variation

Results

Showing a free listing column increased clicks on the sign up button for the basic paid listing by a whopping 198.6%.

Conclusion

When in doubt, test. “People have lots of ideas, hunches and feelings. A best practice is to continue to A/B test and just see what happens,” says Ali.

With Optimizely, Judy’s Book was able to quickly deploy a simple code change and test the impact it had on sign-ups for paid listings before implementing this change on their live site. Ali validated a hunch he had about the pricing page through A/B testing that led to significant gains for the company.