Work & thinkingCase studyShopify

Friction by Design

At Shopify, I proposed a personality quiz that asked people what kind of merchant they wanted to become. Their answers helped determine which landing-page experience they would see.

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Question
Could an extra step make the path to starting a store more relevant?
Decision
Use a personality quiz to understand what someone wanted to build before sending them to a landing page.
Result
RecordThe highest session-to-lead conversion rate among the sources tracked for our store-acquisition work at Shopify.
01 The idea

What kind of merchant do you want to be?

A dropshipper and a coffee shop owner have different businesses in mind. The quiz asked people to picture what they wanted to build, then used qualifying questions to guide them toward a relevant landing-page experience.

The quiz was my idea. I wanted people to see themselves starting a business with Shopify. That gave the extra step a purpose: their answers shaped what came next.

02 The audience

The answers had a second use.

We used the quiz responses and defined events to build cohorts for lookalike audiences and audience modeling. That gave us a way to look for more prospective merchants with similar characteristics. UTM tracking also let us see the traffic we sent.

03 The result

A record for store acquisition.

Our growth team focused on getting people started on the path to opening a Shopify store. Across the sources measured in the attribution system for that work, this campaign recorded the highest session-to-lead conversion rate.

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