It is commonly thought that the shorter the form is on your website or landing page the higher the conversion rate will be. I have personally seen short forms outperform long ones consistently as they cause less friction and require less time and commitment from a potential prospect however I wanted to test if this was always the case.
My hypothesis was that in industries where a website visitor expects to spend time and effort to get a high value service or product a longer form process could outperform a shorter one. The service I decided to test this hypothesis on was home loans which is the single biggest investment in most peoples life and a service where people expect to have to put in some work.
What I Tested
Bluestone Mortgages offer home loans for people who may not fit the usual criteria.
To generate them leads I launched a Google Adwords campaign and designed them a high-converting landing page to drive the traffic to. The landing page was converting well but I wanted to see if I could increase the conversion rate further by increasing the perceived value of filling out the form by making it longer.
Control
The original landing page had a short form and very clear qualifiers (15% deposit needed in an approved city) to cut down on poor quality leads. The page contained a lot of information below the fold about Bluestone and the type of people they can lend to.
Variation
The variation landing page contained a multi step form which had 9-12 form options depending on the type of home loan that suited. The form had validation throughout which stopped people from proceeding if they didn’t meet certain criteria.
The Result
The longer multi-step form increased conversions by 55.6% at a 94.9% confidence level. The longer form also delivered better quality leads with a lot more initial information on the prospect making the multi-step landing page a significant winner.
The Lesson
Whilst short landing pages generally outperform longer ones this is not always the case and ‘best practice’ is not always the winner. Best practice and past experience are a great starting point but you should never stop there and should continue researching and testing to improve your campaign results.