Lead form rebuilt with a conversion heuristic: +19% after 4 losses
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsRebuilding a lead generation form page around the MECLABS Conversion Sequence heuristic lifted conversion by 19%, after four earlier tests failed.
VacationRoost, a vacation rental wholesaler, ran the tests and Director of Marketing Ryan Hutchings presented them at the 2014 Web Optimization Summit; it was published by MarketingExperiments.
Many elements changed at once, so the lift belongs to the full redesign.
- Form conversion: +19% for the fifth treatment.
- Earlier attempts: a shorter form and a borrowed layout both failed to lift, showing that common best practices did not work here.
- Sample size, duration and confidence level were not shared.
Control
VacationRoost's existing lead generation form. Four earlier challengers, including a shortened form and a layout copied from a webinar example, failed to beat it.
Variant
A fifth version that rebuilt the form page by applying every element of the MECLABS Conversion Sequence heuristic, changing many elements together.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Working from a full framework, not a single tip, likely fixed several problems with the form at once.
- A shorter form alone may not help if visitors are not yet convinced the inquiry is worth making.
- A layout that worked for another company was built for a different audience and offer.
Caveats: Bundled test: many elements changed together, so no single change gets the credit. The figures were reported by the company at a conference, with no sample size or confidence shared.
Who ran it
VacationRoost ran this test and published the results (MarketingExperiments). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on VacationRoost →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we redesign our lead form page around a clear framework (motivation, value, incentive, friction, anxiety), then form completions will rise because we address all the reasons people hold back, not just form length.
- Primary metric
- Lead form completion rate
- Guardrails
- Lead quality (qualified or booked rate)
- Cost per lead
- Page bounce rate
- Who should test it
- Lead-gen businesses whose key form has resisted simple fixes. A multi-change test suits lower-traffic sites that can't wait for single-factor results, but you won't learn which change mattered.
Questions
Does shortening a lead form always increase conversions?
No. VacationRoost shortened its form and saw no lift.
Length is only one reason people don't fill in a form.
Should I copy a layout that worked for another company?
Use it as an idea to test, not a sure thing.
A borrowed layout failed for VacationRoost because its visitors and offer were different.
Are multi-change A/B tests worth running?
They can find bigger wins faster, especially on low traffic.
The trade-off is that you can't tell which change caused the result.
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