Boosting Bookings With CRO and UX Testing

Clink Hostels provide a unique and affordable accommodation offering for backpackers and budget-conscious city explorers. With three hostels across London and Amsterdam and plans in the pipeline to open hostels in Dublin and Lisbon, Clink needed a scalable web solution to help them expand their business.

We started with a full website audit before moving on to a redesign of their key landing pages and creation of a new booking system with a mobile-first and fully responsive approach, also catering for multiple languages. The redesign of the site resulted in a 21% increase in website sessions year on year.

To build on the success of their newly designed site and increased traffic, we also produced an on-site content marketing strategy to assist with the creation of high quality and relevant blog content for their London & Amsterdam city guides.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

The Brief

To capitalise on their increase in traffic, Clink wanted to use Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) to create a better user experience for their potential customers and to boost their bookings. As a result, this will ultimately increase revenue.

The aim of the project was to analyse and improve their user journey by eliminating pain points, roadblocks in the on-site experience and streamline the entire booking process.

We were tasked with a series of key business objectives in order to help this, including:

• Provide maximum information for quick decision making
• Generate fewer calls to the call centre
• Encourage customers to book direct
• Show the products in a true light

By providing solutions to these business objectives, this has benefits for Clink’s website user journey such as:

• Finding the city they are interested in booking accommodation for quickly
• Showing their hostels are in a good location
• Demonstrating the hostels are great value for money

Our Approach

Using a leading conversion rate optimisation software, we were able to analyse and better understand Clink’s website user journey.

We were able to identify user pain points by analysing a series of video recordings, heatmaps and conversion funnels. This allowed our efforts to be focused on improving these specific elements or certain areas of the site.

We analysed data from a variety of traffic sources from mobile, desktop and tablet devices because we needed to get a full picture.

The Findings

After we had gathered enough information about their website user journey, we found a few common themes, including the following:

• A high volume of people were checking availability without selecting a date
• There were a number of dead clicks on the room gallery, hostel photo and on the hostel address areas
• Landing pages referred to from affiliate sources converted lower
• Older versions of web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, proved to be significantly underperforming

The Fixes

From our testing, we found that users weren’t necessarily trying to check availability, but more trying to find price information quickly. As a result, no dates were being entered and when they were, the rooms were usually unavailable. To counter this, we set a default date a few weeks in advance for 2 nights, tweaked the layout of the form and changed the CTA button to allow for more prospective visits.

Room pages had a redesign to make images appear larger. As a result, this reduced the need for dead clicks and pushing users towards a booking by providing a better idea of the rooms they can expect.

We made booking widgets more prominent across the entire website, with sticky bars and flyout CTA’s to book direct from any page. This was instead of navigating to the individual hostel page.

To help counter the issue of conversion rates on Internet Explorer we conducted a thorough cross browser testing exercise on numerous browser versions and devices and carried out fixes for layout and performance going back to IE11.1.

The Results

As a result of the changes we made to Clink’s site, there was an increase in bookings, a boost in average order value of bookings made, fewer dead clicks and users spending more time on site.

Revenue saw an increase of 30% year on year, whilst Average Order Value increased by 40% year on year. This is as a result of users easily being able to find what they’re looking for.

Summary

Conversion rate optimisation can help generate more revenue and leads without the need to entirely rebuild your site. As a result, it allows you to focus on optimising and improving elements of your site that users have troubles using, without redesigning everything.