Success Story

The Vineyard Tested Its CTA To Increase Conversions

32.12% Conversion

About The Vineyard

The Vineyard is a luxury hotel located in Berkshire, about an hour from Central London. In addition to luxurious accommodation, the hotel offers its guests great food and a large selection of fine wines. The original art adorning many of the hotel’s walls is another attraction.

The hotel hired Splice Marketing (now Essex SEO) to optimize the site for search and improve conversion rate of its website. Splice is a VWO client that uses VWO for testing optimization possibilities.

Goals: Increase click-throughs to the room booking page

The Vineyard wanted to increase the number of visits to their room booking page.

Tests run: Make CTA More Visible to Visitors

This is what the original home page for The Vineyard looked like:

The Splice team noted that the call to action, book online was almost hidden at the end of the page, where it was hardly likely to be noticed by visitors and prospective customers.

The team decided to make the CTA more visible to visitors so that it would attract their attention. The hypothesis was that more visitors would click on a CTA that was prominently visible on the home page.

The team created a CTA button with the text Book Online (same as the original). But the CTA button was prominently placed on the page. The F-shaped eye movement pattern would ensure that visitors read “Book Online” right after they would have read “Stay with Us.” The CTA button used the same maroon color in the original design.

This was the variation page created and A/B tested against the control by using the VWO platform:

Conclusion: 32.12% Increase in Click-Throughs to the Room Booking Page

Not surprisingly, the click-through rate (CTR) to the room booking page increased by 32.12%, with a near perfect 99.99% chance to beat the original.

The result was on expected lines because a page with a large, clearly-visible CTA button added above the fold should have always done better than the one where the CTA was near-invisible.

Here is a comparison of the original (control) and the variation it was tested against:

Apart from the obvious outcome of boosting online bookings, the value of this A/B test also lay in the fact that it demonstrated to the hotel’s owners and managers the value of conversion rate optimization.

This was an important learning because from our experience at VWO, often, it is organizational resistance that comes in the way of making changes to the website that can optimize conversions.