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How website usability testing increased sales in the face of the global travel recession

Nature Air used website usability testing and improved search engine optimization to reverse decreasing web sales. The global recession has taken a serious toll on the travel industry. Costa Rica Airline, Nature Air, was feeling the harsh reality of the recession.

However, their online revenues are now up over 20-30% over their record sales in 2008. One of the key tools used to help make this turnaround was Google Website Optimizer. Below is an example of a website optimizer test that helped increase the conversion rate of their 17 destination landing pages from 3% to 19%.

Nature Air’s destination pages are key to the overall success of the website since they are among the top landing pages that people land on from search engines. These pages garner the best traffic from users who are in the later stages of the buying cycle and are ready to book a flight. Thus it is critical for these pages to effectively push people to the flight booking engine.

Original Destination Landing Page

This is the original design of the 17 destination landing pages:

New Destination Landing Page

This is the new design of the 17 destination landing pages, which was really only a simple change of adding a contextual call to action:

Simple Changes can Turn into Big Profits

The amazing thing is this website optimizer test illustrates that very simple changes can have a huge impact. In fact, a 591% conversion rate increase…wow! Below is a screenshot of the Google Website Optimizer report screen showing the dramatic results.

Below is a screen capture that shows the ONE specific change that was made to this page that was responsible for the dramatic conversion rate improvement.

The thinking behind this change was that by placing the call to action within the content area, with messaging specific to the location, and including the starting fare price, the call to action would become more relevant and people would connect with it and be persuaded to book a flight.

What is better than increasing conversion 591%?

Increasing the free search engine traffic to these 17 landing pages. Check back for our follow-up blog post to this website optimizer case study to see how we got over 50 #1 rankings on Google and over 100 #2 & #3 rankings on Google for Nature Air which drove more people to these pages who were actively searching for location specific flights in Costa Rica.

Read more about the Nature Air Website Optimization Case Study
Learn more about our Google Website Optimizer Consulting Services.