Launched in 2001 by Martin Bysh and Marcus Hamilton to keep in touch with friends during a period working abroad, MakeFriendsOnline.com welcomed its one millionth member in 2007 and is now one of the largest independent friendship and dating sites in Europe.

With visitor growth maximized through extensive advertising, the founders felt that a focus on conversion rates could create significant further growth and appointed Optimost to conduct a program of A/B and multivariable testing, initially on the landing page.

Optimost tested multiple variations of the landing page, three of which performed well against the control page. One of the three pages was clearly the winner outperforming the original page by 26% and was therefore selected as the new optimized landing page. Interestingly, the page that performed best was not the one that Martin Bysh had thought would win:

"The scary thing about this type of testing is to realize that if we hadn’t done it, we could have chosen a new page on intuition that would have performed worse than the original and we’d have lost money. The results were quite counter-intuitive and so we’ve asked Optimost to apply the same testing techniques to other key pages on the site."

Some of the key learnings from the test:

• Something as simple as a change of color can make a big difference
• Relying on intuition could lose you money
• Simplifying the conversion funnel by combining the first step form with the landing page increased conversions
• What works for your site today may not work so well tomorrow

Some of the test plan variables included:

• Headline
• Marketing Message
• Call to Action
• Image
• Form
• Form Background Color
• Opt-in Message
• Submit Button

About MakeFriendsOnline.com

Launched by Martin Bysh and Marcus Hamilton in 2001, MakeFriendsOnline.com is one of the web’s most successful UK-based dating and friendship communities.

Aimed at bringing people together, the website offers a safe and friendly environment to contact people privately. The site has over one million members and continues to grow dramatically.