True intent study

The challenge

An unusual peak of visitors on the SSL product page could not be explained with the available data. No SEA traffic was directed to this page, no newsletter on the topic was sent. Therefore we decided to conduct a true intent study on the page with the single open question "Why did you visit the website?"

Project background

SSL certificates are a product that can only be bought as an add-on to other products like hosting, WordPress or sitebuilder. The product page for SSL is mainly a source of information for potential customers. It is not possible to order any product on this page. Most of the SSL certificates are being sold in the cross-selling for other products.

Goals from user perspective

unknown before conducting the study

Goals from business perspective

improve the click through rate to other product pages
reduce the exit rate
improve the amount and type of information shown on the page, based on user motivation

My role

My role in the project was to suggest an appropriate method to understand why users visit the page, to conduct the true intent study and to communicate results to stakeholders.

Step 1 → Selecting the right method

Based on web analytics data, we knew that big part of the page visitors were current customers, which is not the case for most of the other product pages. Current customers usually visit the FAQ area, instead of the product pages, because it is linked from the login area.

Not knowing the reason why users visit the page, it was impossible to recruit users for interviews. Therefore it was necessary to learn more about the visitors and the most obvious way to do so was to create a single question survey.

Step 2 → Survey creation

A true intent study with the single open question "Why did you visit the website?" and a "thank you" message was created with the tool Rogator. The question was shown in a popup in the lower right angle of the page only to desktop users after 5 seconds on the page. The optimisation of the survey for mobile devices would have involved longer implementation times and therefore we decided against it.

Step 3 → Evaluation of results

A population of 8560 contacts resulted in only 180 finished surveys with a completion rate as low as 2.1%. Based on the answers it was possible to gather the following information:

13% were on the page with the intention to buy
14% needed specific information on SSL certificates, for example technical details
35% were current customers
the remaining answers were lacking context, so it was not possibile to cluster them in a meaningful way

The information gathered from current customers showed that 42% of them were on the page in order to find information on email. SSL certificates cannot be combined with email products and thus it was necessary to find out what exactly led them to the SSL product page.

Some more detailed answers could help the reconstruction of the user journey - there was a newsletter on encrypted email communication, that led to a multi-topic FAQ page, including both information on email and on SSL certificates, linking to the SSL product page.

As a result of the study, several touch points of the user journey were optimized in accordance with the newly discovered data:

the content of the newsletter on email encryption was improved
the multi topic FAQ page was divided in single topic pages
the product page was redesigned considering the user needs, and a detailed step-by-step explanation how to buy SSL certificates was included

Learnings

True intent study could be an appropiate first step in getting to know the visitors of a page, when no other data is available.