Inbound Marketing: How Ancestry.com increased conversion by 20% with reduced choice barriers and targeted content

"Our mission at Ancestry is to help everyone discover, preserve and share their family history,” Emily Titcomb, Senior Manager of Product Marketing, Ancestry.com, said.

Because the offer pages are the highest trafficked areas on Ancestry.com where visitors convert to members, the team felt these pages were worth testing. With the overall goal of increasing conversion rates, the team's first motion was to optimize the current page in an effort to differentiate subscribers.

Once the in-house testing and optimization team started to dig, they realized there was more to be done. While users were more targeted through the optimization of the page, now the design of these offer pages wasn't consistent. The team sought to test a consistent look and feel across all of its offer pages.

The project was broken down into three broad phases:

Phase 1: Optimize current page

The team realized that they were not serving customers in the best, most relevant way, and started implementing self-selectors to allow people to make a conscious choice to either start the free trial or subscribe.

"So they're doing an action to say they want to go to that offer page. Interrupted browsers really aren't doing that. They're actually just trying to look at the content and access it, and we're just hitting them with this offer page because they don't have access," Titcomb said.

Phase 2: Create a template

In creating a template, the goal was to design a consistent look and feel for customers, and be able to customize it easily. The team also wanted to make the experience responsive across all devices.

"At the same time, because we had started looking at different customer segments, we thought we would benefit from moving to a template format so we could have one consistent layout that performed well and then funnel different content messaging [and] imagery into that template in order to improve conversion that way," Julia Babiarz, Senior Interactive Art Director, Ancestry.com, said.

Phase 3: Customize and optimize

Ancestry.com has customer segments it had begun reaching out to with contextual content by mapping out the user journey and utilizing internal data. The segments consist of:

• Self-selectors


• Interrupted browsers


• Past free trailers


• Upgraders

In this customization phase, they wanted to implement different messaging and different content for different people.

"Our goal is to really get to a place where we can actually break [customer segments] out into shades of color based on all of this other user data we have," Titcomb said.

Related Resources

MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 — At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, February 22-24, 2016

Ecommerce Research Chart: How can companies increase conversion rates?

The Complex Sale: Lead scoring effort increases conversion 79%