A/B Test — Is a “Buy Now” CTA Always the Best Option?

Challenge

Several months after launching GoTo Resolve, our UX team ran a user study where multiple participants were asked why they didn’t click the “Buy Now” CTA buttons on the pricing page. When pressed for more information, they added they weren’t ready to buy yet and were looking for a way to configure their plan first to get a sense of final cost.

What they didn’t know, was that the plan customization screen is precisely where they’d be taken had they clicked any of the “Buy Now” buttons. This led us to ponder whether changing the call-to-action text in our buttons could encourage more users to click on them.

Solution

I worked with our web team to run a standard test design where 50% of traffic would see “Buy Now” in the CTA and the other 50% would see “Customize Plan”. The test would run until we either achieved significance or met the sample size requirement.

Here are the buttons for Control Scenario (A) - Buy Now:

And here are the buttons for Test Scenario (B) - Customize Plan:

Results

• The Test Scenario (B) - Customize Plan variant won, with an improved clickthrough rate of +22% over the control scenario.

• Additionally, the other CTAs on the pricing page such as “Start for Free” and “Contact Sales” did not experience any material change in clickthrough rate. This shows that we were simply helping more people find the right next step, versus stealing share from other CTAs.

Key Takeaways

• Sometimes even a simple change like the text in a button can make a difference for users

• The test illustrates the power of framing messaging within the context of what the user wants to do (“Customize Plan”) as opposed to what you would like them to do (”Buy Now”)