A/B Test — Does an H1 Heading Matter on a Pricing Page?

Challenge

When our team first launched the GoTo Resolve Plans and Pricing page in Feb 2022, we led the page with the pricing cards as this was, and still is, the standard UX for a GoTo.com pricing page. This of course meant the page had no H1 heading.

Internally, we debated whether the SEO value of having an H1 would be worth the potentially negative impact of pushing the pricing cards, and the CTAs within them, further down the page and possibly below the fold. So we decided just to test it and see what happens.

Solution

I worked with a copywriter to draft some pricing page headings and ran a standard test design where 50% of traffic would not see a heading and the other 50% would see a basic heading and subheading. The test would run until we either achieved significance or met the sample size requirement.

Here is what the Control Scenario (A) - No Heading looked like.

Here is what the Test Scenario (B) - Show Heading looked like.

Results

What I expected was that the inclusion of a basic heading would have no material impact to what users do on the page. But much to my surprise, the Test Scenario (B) - Show Heading variant won!

• In aggregate, total clickthrough rate on ALL pricing card CTAs increased by 11% when the heading was present.

• The clickthrough rate increase was observed on all CTAs, so there was no cannibalization effect.

• For users that came in through the organic search channel, the effect was more pronounced (+13%).

Takeaways

• It’s possible that users may not always know what they are expected to do on a given page and by using a heading to set that expectation, it provides them with a next best action.

• This could explain why the CTA click rate by users from organic search were slightly higher, since the pricing page would have been the first page of their journey.