On Design: We Thought it Would Help
With the release of our ground mail invoicing service, we wanted to let people know that they can send one piece of ground mail for free from their FreshBooks account. So we added a little notice to our Subscribe page. Here is our orginal subscribe page:
Here is our new subscribe page with the ground mail notice/offer:
Looks lovely doesn’t it? Well guess what? Fewer people are subscribing from this new page. Despite the offer. No kidding.
We track how many people look at our subscribe page, and how many people then go on to sign-up. (If you want to know more about my thoughts on tracking metrics for web applications, read this article). In this case, over 2% FEWER people are signing up now…that two percent matters, and we have enough data confirm it’s true. I’m going to run it for a little longer – just to be 100% certain – but I’d say you can expect us to take that down in another week or two…and if not, I’ll update this thread with an explanation.
Important Point: The reason I know when we put this graphic up on our subscribe page, is we maintain a very important file we call “THE CHANGE LOG”. In it we detail any changes we make to our site, and the date we make them. Thanks to this file I can select date intervals in my web analytics for before and after the change, and draw meaningful conclusions.
If you maintain a website and making periodic changes, keep a change log. It’s worth the effort.
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1:20 pm
[...] I just posted an interesting discovery on the FreshBooks blog – the post includes a really useful tip for anyone building a web app. [...]
8:43 pm
Can web design decisions be objective?
His post describes how a very small change on the sign-up page – which subjectively made a lot of sense and looked great – reduced their sign-up rates by 2%.
10:04 pm
I agree.
Signup page is one of the most important page. Some thoughts…
- Not all people understand what ‘ground mail’ is
- Maybe ‘ground mail’ is not the most important features they expect to have, when they first register.
- Let people who register, focus on ‘register’, without any distraction.
4:16 am
Interesting… and the tip about change log is very important. In fact in ANY system you should have some sort of change log – I do some IT support for customers and whenever something goes wrong my first question is “What changed before it all fell over” often it is the least likely cause that had the effect.
As to why this page is having a negative effect … I think that people are now so bombarded with free offers, mostly bogus or worthless, that a big “Free” banner actually has a negative effect. It certainly does for me. As someone else has already said – concentrate on registering without distraction.
11:09 am
Bryan: truly excellent points – anyone would do well to think about their subscribe page in the way you do.
DavidB: good points as well.
I think the main this it’s the wrong step in the process to let people know they can send an invoice for free via the US post when they get a free account…again, we’re going to let it run a little while longer, but I’m betting it will be gone soon.
Thanks for sharing.
10:54 am
Hey Mike – it’s still up, that explanation you promised?