SITUATION

VisitPITTSBURGH runs a paid search promotional campaign each year as part of their Pittsburgh is Kidsburgh vacation package. The Kidsburgh campaign mainly focuses on surrounding drive markets to help push ticket sales and hotel stays for local area attractions and hoteliers. As part of the campaign setup, Simpleview's paid media team did an analysis of visitor site engagement to see what visitor actions were like after clicking through a search ad. Additionally, the team wanted to know how many visitors were clicking through VisitPITTSBURGH's site to the booking engine. Their findings showed that historically, there were minimal click-throughs to the booking engine, which created an opportunity to increase ticket sales and hotel bookings for the Kidsburgh campaign.

SOLUTION

Once the opportunity presented itself to optimize the landing page, the Simpleview team identified friction points and barriers along the conversion path. Through a heuristic analysis of the site and an attempt to "book" a Kidsburgh package, the biggest point of friction was identified in the process of getting visitors to the Kidsburgh booking page. A test was then created to see if click-throughs could be increased.

The existing layout of the landing page included step-by-step instructions to reach the Kidsburgh package page through the booking widget. Unfortunately, the beginning of these instructions was located below the fold of the landing page, and did not have a strong call-to-action.

To alleviate the identified friction, Simpleview staff worked with VisitPITTSBURGH to create a button that was more visible (above the fold and high contrast with the colors of the site), and removed the additional steps needed to book Kidsburgh package, which ultimately created a better flow for visitors and removed the barriers that caused frustration. 

RESULTS

Since implementing this test, the new version of the page has seen a 254% increase in pageviews for the Kidsburgh package year-over-year.

More importantly, VisitPITTSBURGH experienced a 75% increase in their package attraction tickets sales, with a 70% increase in product revenue. Lastly, hotel bookings were also positively affected with a 103% increase in package hotel rooms, with a 50% increase in product revenue.