If your website conversion rate is lower than expected on mobile devices, there are a few reasons you should consider. This post focuses on the last issue—clutter and complexity.
- Traffic composition. A high percentage of your discovery campaign traffic (where you’re putting your brand in front of people who have never seen you or searched for your brand or category) comes from mobile devices. Filter that traffic out so that you’re fairly comparing mobile performance to desktop performance.
- Speed. Mobile network speed is better than ever, but some users still suffer from slow speeds due to their device or their network—especially while on vacation. (I recently struggled to book an experience on my phone while between cities in Colorado, since the page just wouldn’t load.) Test using tools like https://gtmetrix.com/, which lets you throttle the connection, or https://pagespeed.web.dev/, which uses a throttled connection for testing.
- Clutter/complexity. Designing for mobile takes a lot of discipline, and it’s easy for a page to become too long or cluttered for mobile devices.
2 Things That Improved A Tour Page’s Mobile Conversion Rate by 44%
After a recent website rebuild, while most of our conversion numbers had improved, one of our tour pages saw a significant and mysterious decrease in its mobile conversion rate.
After some investigation, we noticed 2 issues:
- The page was quite cluttered on mobile, particularly when people first landed on the page.
- There was a LOT to scroll through, to get to the information about planning your visit.
We got to work, creating an a/b test with the following fixes. All of the changes were done with Google Optimize—no coding needed.
Part 1: Decluttering
- Removed the promotional banner. It was fine on desktop, but it was encroaching too much on the limited viewport of a mobile device and didn’t apply to enough people (at least not on the page we were working on) to justify it.
- Removed the coupon callout. There was a reason behind adding it in the first place, but on a mobile device, it was one of the factors contributing to the clutter.
- Removed the tour dates/times near the top of the page. This information is easily found when guests start the booking process.
- Removed an extra image block. Photography and video are incredibly important to get right, but in this case, we decided to remove one of the photo blocks, leaving an image gallery and a video. It turns out, that was enough for most guests.
- Shortened some of the copy—particularly a long headline that was too long for mobile devices.
- [After the test] Switched some vertically stacked cards to horizontal carousels. This allows guests on mobile devices to skip over several cards quickly if that section (for example, tour upgrades) is not applicable to them.
Part 2: Re-ordering / prioritizing
To reach important details about location, parking, etc., guests had to scroll past quite a bit of information. We theorized that those details would help customers feel more confident about booking, so we moved this section higher on the page.
The Results
The results were better than expected, with Google Optimize calling the simplified and reordered version the clear winner—with a 98% chance of being the winner—in just a couple of weeks. The calculated conversion rate was 44% higher than the original version.
Our developers rolled out the update to our tour template so that all tours could benefit from the improvement.
We’re now testing this concept for another client and seeing positive—albeit more modest—results there as well. We hope that some of these tips help you upgrade your mobile experience and create more bookings.
