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Home > Services > Case Studies > Academy 123 - Harnessing the Power of A/B Testing

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Academy 123 - Harnessing the Power of A/B Testing

OVERVIEW
This document summarizes a Search Marketing campaign conducted by Enquiro Search Solutions for Academy 123, property of Discovery Holding Company (DHC) (NASDAQ: DISCA, DISCB). Academy 123’s math product NutshellMath Homework Help was the focus of the campaign. This document highlights the processes in which Enquiro helped Academy 123 increase NutshellMath’s free signup conversion rates; done through the use of A/B Testing. The A/B test ran for 2.5 weeks, comparing Academy 123’s current landing pages versus pages modified by Enquiro. Omniture’s SiteCatalyst was used as the web analytics framework in order to capture and report the findings.

NutshellMath Homework Help is a market leading math homework help product for middle school and high school students. The innovative technology and teacher recorded instructional content is developed by Academy123, Inc, located in Westlake Village, CA.

THE SCOPE

  • The timeframe for the A/B test would consist of a 2.5 week time period.
  • NutshellMath had products geared towards 3 segments: Students, Parents, and Teachers. Each had their own landing page therefore 3 tests would be conducted simultaneously.
  • Traffic for the landing pages would come from selected Google Adwords campaigns.
  • In order to measure the success of the test, web pages associated with the NutshellMath product would be tagged with SiteCatalyst code. Enquiro would provide consultation with the implementation of the web analytics.
  • Enquiro would monitor the results daily and report on the final results.
  • Academy 123 would redirect a percentage of all the visitors to the Enquiro modified page.

ENQUIRO’S SOLUTION
Enquiro had two main objectives; the first was to revise the current landing pages so that visitors would be more enticed to sign up for a free subscription of the product. The secondary focus was to accurately measure the performance of the 2 pages in the A/B test and present the findings to Academy 123 in an intuitive format.

Enquiro’s tactical team of experts (including both Web Analytics strategists and Organic Search Marketing strategists) was given the task of suggesting modifications for the pages. Because it was an A/B test, only a single component of the page could be modified in order to truly understand the relevance in the findings. After some deliberation the Enquiro team determined that the current pages were not utilizing the main “sign up” conversion trigger to its fullest advantage and that it should be moved from the right corner to the center of the pages. The team also suggested that Academy 123 should add a simple message to capitalize on the strength of the NutshellMath product (video tutorials). Therefore, the following text was added above the newly placed conversion trigger: “Video explanation to the problems in your textbook.”

TOOLS
SiteCatalyst is an Enquiro recommended web analytics solution, so it was the obvious choice as the measurement tool to monitor the test results. After consulting with Omniture’s support team, Enquiro’s web analytics team designed a very effective method to capture the results of the A/B test. The web analytics team used three ecommerce variables to track the number of impressions for each page, and since “free signups” were already being tracked as conversions, the web analytics team turned on the ability to segment each page by the number of “free signups.”

Academy 123 implemented a simple JavaScript function which would send some of the page traffic to the new Enquiro modified version of the page. Since JavaScript was used during the redirection, the new Enquiro page would not get indexed by search engines, hence avoiding any potential duplicate content issues.

RESULTS
After 2.5 weeks of testing, the results showed that in each of the 3 segments – Students, Parents and Teachers – the Enquiro modified page had better conversion rates. In the student segment the Enquiro Page conversion rate nearly doubled. In the parent segment the Enquiro page had 8 times more conversions. In the teacher segment the Enquiro page had a 26.8% increase in the number of conversions.

NEXT STEPS
At Enquiro, we believe it’s very important to include some form of A/B or multivariate testing in all marketing efforts where the purpose is to generate online conversions. Increasing conversions such as signups, purchases, and product views are all tied directly to your business’s goals (your bottom line), therefore it’s vital to make this process as effective as possible.