Evolve Vacation Rental’s CRO specialist, Matt Mattson, spoke with us about the company’s digital strategy, its focus on the user experience, and how they increased new visitor conversions by 161% in one year.
Evolve Vacation Rental wanted to create a middle ground in the home rental market. Traditional property managers often came with high fees (sometimes starting at 30–50%), which meant many homeowners settled on a do-it-yourself approach for marketing, booking coordination, guest communication, and house maintenance.
So, Evolve decided to fill the gap in the market: to make home rental easy, safe, reliable, and more profitable for owners.
The Situation
The accuracy of any experiment depends on statistical significance: a long enough test duration, a large enough sample size, and a minimum threshold for improvement.
This is why Evolve focused on channels with the highest amount of web traffic when building out its experimentation strategy.
Evolve wanted to understand how user intent differed between channels to optimize visitors’ experiences. For instance, Evolve saw that Facebook ad traffic was much more focused on brand awareness—that is, people interested in learning more generally about Evolve’s offering. Google traffic, on the other hand, showed a specific intent among users, which Evolve was able to zero in on by analyzing search queries (and then funneling these insights into tests).
The Strategy
Lead generation and new visitor conversion rates were two main KPIs for Evolve. So, one of the first steps in their experimentation strategy was to separate the traffic from Facebook and Google ads to distinguish new vs. returning visitors. From there, the digital team ran multiple split tests on landing pages to gain a better understanding of what information users were searching for and how to best present it.
Since a large part of this experimentation, series was focused on gaining better quality leads, Evolve decided to test the call-to-action on a landing page for homeowners interested in joining their network. The original CTA said “Start for Free,” while a variation was changed to “See if You Qualify” to see if it this phrasing would attract more mature leads and better promote Evolve’s offering.
Original
Variation
Which it did—with the variation, form completions went up by 34% along with a 161% increase in conversions.
Takeaway Tip
Evolve is now leveraging the insights from these landing page experiments to tailor (and optimize) content pathways for specific audience segments using multi-page tests. Reflecting on the massive 161% increase in new visitor conversions this past year, Mattson notes that every test—whether it increased conversions or not—contributed to this growth. Experimentation is a process, and its gains grow exponentially the more you test and cement your strategies in data, not assumptions.
