Success Story

Provident Hotels and Resorts Used MVT To Increase CTR

9.1% Click-through rate

About Provident Hotels & Resorts

Provident Hotels & Resorts, which began as a residential condominium management organization, quickly evolved into a pioneer of the Condominium Hotel Industry. By 1980, they had established one of the first “condo-hotel” properties on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Reservations in Provident’s hotels, resorts and condos can be made via providentresorts.com.

Provident hired Sabre Hospitality Solutions Digital Marketing to optimize its website and drive more clicks on the CTA buttons, which used VWO’s platform and tools for its optimization work.

Goals

With an aim to increase the number of clicks on Provident’s CTA buttons, Sabre decided to optimize the combination of form title and CTA button text by performing a multivariate test.

Tests run

This is the page where the test was conducted:

When a user clicked on the dates, the CTA that appeared looked like this:

The original title on the form, “Make a Reservation” was tested against two variations – “Book Your Stay” and “Reserve a Room”. The original text on the CTA button was “Check Availability”. “Book Now”, “Find Rooms” and “Search” were created as variations.

Sabre wanted to see which combination of form title and button text would drive most visitors to check for rates and availability of rooms. The test goal being tracked was the number of clicks on the CTA button. As the reservation console was visible on all their pages, the test was run sitewide by using *websitename.com* pattern to match all URLs.

Since there were 3 variations of the first element (form title) and 4 variations of the second element (CTA button text), VWO automatically generated the following 12 combinations (3×4) to be pitted against each other:

The test was run on a total of 27,500 visitors over a month. The traffic was equally split among the 12 combinations.

Conclusion

Combination 12, with Form title “Reserve a Room” and CTA text “Search” won, recording a 9.1% improvement in CTR.

Explaining the test results, Kelsey Slater, Web Strategy Manager at Sabre Hospitality Solutions, said:

“I think the 12th combination won because the “Reserve a Room” headline describes exactly what the user is trying to do when they click on the call-to-action button. They are going to “Search” for rooms that are available during that time frame, looking to reserve a room doing the desired timeframe they select. When someone thinks about making a reservation, they may consider that with a reservation at a restaurant. But I think Reserve a Room is specific to hotels to tell the user that they are only looking to reserve a room when they click-through this reservation console to initiate this process. Additionally, search is the immediate action that happens when they click-through to the console.”