Work & thinkingCase studyShopify
Friction by Design
At Shopify, I added an interactive step before the landing page. The aim was to make the traffic arriving there more qualified.
- Question
- Could an extra step improve the quality of incoming traffic?
- Decision
- Introduce an interactive experience before the landing page.
- Result
- RecordThe highest session-to-lead conversion rate on record at Shopify.
Give the extra step a job.
Removing steps can make a journey easier. In this case, an extra step gave people a chance to engage before reaching the landing page, and helped qualify the traffic that continued.
The experience also created micro-conversion signals that could be used for bidding. The point was to be deliberate about what the platforms were learning from.
Not every step is friction worth removing. Some of it tells you who’s actually interested.
A record conversion rate.
The resulting session-to-lead conversion rate was the highest Shopify had recorded. That’s the record this case refers to: the share of sessions that became leads.
The idea was counterintuitive. The result made it worth examining where an extra step can help, and where it would simply get in the way.
On camera.
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