Today, we released 3 big updates including A/B Testing and Goal Tracking, but before we get into that let’s rewind to how we got here…
JP, Chris, and Dave at YC
The story of Proof begins with Chris, Dave, and J̦P — 3 friends living and working in Annapolis, Maryland. As marketers by trade, they were always trying out new experiments on their pages: writing new headlines, uploading different photos, tweaking button colors.
In short, testing was a huge part of their culture.
Then one day, they were brainstorming radical ways to increase the conversion rate on a particular landing page for their website. That night, JP happened to see something pretty nifty online when booking a hotel room. It tried to encourage him to book right away by showing him how many people had recently booked the room.
It was a simple piece of information, but the inclusion on the bottom right of the page made him purchase nearly immediately.
He thought, “this could work really well on our site.” It didn’t just apply for big travel websites like Hotels.com, Airbnb, or HomeAway — it could work for any website.
The next day, JP typed up some code and launched what would become the first version of Proof. By adding a social proof notification to their marketing site — Chris, Dave, and JP saw their conversion rate skyrocket overnight.
It went from 20 to 42%.
As I’m sure you know, that’s a crazy increase in the marketing world.
They shipped their code to a friend to test. It worked. They sent it off to another friend. It worked. Their marketing business quickly was shifting into a software company.
Fast forward to October 2018. Proof graduated Y Combinator and relocated to Austin, and has grown to a team of 15 strong. We have 3000+ paying customers and run on 15k+ websites. And as we’ve scaled, our focus has been lasered in on one thing: Building the best social proof software platform in the world.
As part of that goal, we’ve worked to launch features that customers directly request.
So, what updates did we launch for you over the past year? Here are a few:
- New Notification Types: With this update, you are able to run 4 different types of notifications: Hot Streaks, Recent Activity, Live Visitor Count, and Conversion Cards.
- Flexible URL matching: On Proof, you can set also multiple capture URLs and display URLs for your campaign. For instance, if you’re A/B testing two checkout flows, you could still have that data display on a single marketing page.
- Click through URLs: When visitors click a Proof notification, you can send them to any destination URL that you set in your Proof dashboard. We’ve seen many customers use this feature to send leads to higher converting demos and checkout funnels.
- Export enriched leads to CSV: You’re also able to export your Proof data (includes the lead’s name, location, gender, browser, OS, and whether or not a lead is a first-time visitor) to a CSV file. Then, with that info, you can analyze your traffic and put it into other tools — such as Zapier and Hubspot.
- 24 hour & 7-day campaign updates: With this update, you are able to see how many page views, unique visitors, notification clicks, and captured leads you’ve generated in the last 24 hours, or the trailing 7 days.
And today, we’re excited to announce 3 new features that are now live in your Proof account.
New Feature #1: Set and Track Your Goal Progress
We launched goal tracking for two main reasons:
1) Without a goal, it’s hard to gauge your success.
2) It sets up the framework for Update #2 — A/B Testing!
Now, on Proof, when setting up a Campaign, you’re given the option of setting a goal. And we really recommend that you try it out!
Not only will setting up a goal help optimize your campaigns towards a specific result, but it will also give you a baseline metric to track for all your campaigns.
For instance, want to know not just how Proof impacts your leads, but also the impact on your MRR? Now you can!
For instance, instead of just seeing a 12% increase in Demos leads in your dashboard, you could see that equates $7,800 in new MRR over the last 30 days. Powerful stuff!
If nothing else, setting up goal tracking is a requirement before starting an A/B test… a huge conversion rate boosting feature of Proof! In your account, under the Goals tab on the left-hand side, there are 4 steps you need to take to launch a goal to track:
1. Create a Goal Name
2. Set a Conversion Value
3. Choose a Goal Category
4. Set a URL
Step 1: Create a Goal Name
In this field, you give your Goal a Unique name. This is something that you can use internally to track your progress towards certain goals.
Example: We named one of our Goals “Viewed Pricing Page.” We use that label surprisingly enough to track visitors who view our pricing page.
Step 2: Set a Conversion Value
Here, enter the average dollar value for 1 conversion for your business.
Example: If your goal is Purchases then you’ll want to enter your average shopping cart value. You can calculate this by Total Sales Revenue / Total Number of Orders for the last 30 days.
If you can’t think of a conversion value, put $1 for now. You can always change this later.
Step 3: Choose a Goal Category
Next, you’ll choose the Goal Category you’re tracking. You have a few options on what to set here as a conversion:
- Lead: A lead goal is when you capture some sort of contact information from a visitor.
- Purchases: A purchase goal is when you have a customer complete a checkout.
- Schedule: A schedule goal indicates that a lead has scheduled a call, a demo, or some other event.
- Subscribe: A subscribe goal is when someone registers on a mailing list of some sort (i.e. a blog newsletter).
- Start Trial: A start trial goal indicates a visitor started using your service and enrolled in a trial.
- View Content: A view content goal indicates a visitor read a blog article, page, or some other piece of content on your site.
- Complete Registration: A complete registration goal indicates a visitor finished a signup flow on your site.
Step 4: Set a URL
To track your goal, you need to indicate the URL of the page a visitor sees immediately after completing an action. For example, if a visitor was buying a shirt, the confirmation sale page would be the URL to include here as it’s the page a visitor sees immediately after buying a good.
Or for another example, a registration confirmed page would be the capture URL for registering for a webinar.
Want to set up a campaign goal yourself? Read our full article on setting up a goal here.
New Feature #2: A/B Test Proof
Since we started Proof, we’ve heard one question repeated, time and time again. People continually ask us, “Will Proof actually help me increase the conversion rate on my site?”
We’re confident the answer is yes — and we’ve used positive results from our customers (a 10-15% increase is the average customer conversion boost at Proof) to back up our claims. But we wanted to be able to more confidently show you that Proof works on your landing pages.
And now we can!
Proof has worked over the last few months to build A/B testing into our platform. We’re really excited for this to launch and we hope you’re able to see value in this feature. To set up an A/B test, you simply set up a campaign, create a campaign goal, and then click the “Start A/B Test button” on your Campaign Overview screen.
Once it’s live on your Proof campaigns, A/B testing becomes an even more powerful tool!
- You can run an A/B test of one Proof notification type versus another (for instance, Hot Streaks vs Recent Activity),
- You could run tests on the copy (i.e. calling visitors “marketers” vs “visitors”), placement (left side vs right side)
- You could run a test on practically any other variable you can imagine!
Here’s our help our article on how to create a general A/B test and here’s how to A/B Test Proof vs No Proof on your site.
New Feature #3: Proof is Now Fully Live on the Zapier Store
Back in August, we announced the beta launch of our Zapier app. By introducing Zapier, we provided a powerful and versatile option to use when setting up Proof campaigns.
Zapier lets you connect Proof to other web services and capture new conversions (signups, purchases, etc). These conversions can then be displayed as Recent Activity notifications on your website.
There’s no coding required, it’s easy to set up an automation, and there are now more than 1300 apps that you can use to feed data into your Proof feed.
And now, as of October, we’re happy to announce we’re no longer in beta — we’re fully live on the Zapier store! This is huge news for our customers. You’re now able to easily set up your Zaps from both within the Proof app or on Zapier.
In your Proof dashboard, you’ll see a new view on your Integrations tab. Now, you’re able to easily switch on Zaps for some of the most popular integrations.
And on Zapier, you’re given the same option. You can simply type in the name of the app you want to integrate and get to work on launching a direct integration with Proof. Powerful stuff!
Curious what integrations Proof customers are turning on? Here are 10 of the most popular ones right now:
- Add new Stripe charges to Proof as conversions
- Add new Wufoo entries to Proof as conversion
- Add new Calendar events to Proof as conversions
- Add new Typeform entries to Proof as conversions
- Add new Magneto orders to Proof as conversions
- Add new MailChimp subscribers to Proof as conversions
- Add new BigCommerce orders to Proof as conversions
- Add new Kajabi purchases to Proof as conversions
- Add new SurveyMonkey responses to Proof as conversions
- Add new Active Campaign contacts to Proof as conversions
Interested in setting up Zapier for your Proof campaigns? Read our Integrate using Zapier help article.
Keep an eye out for our next Update!
In our next product update, we’ll go more in-depth on the power of A/B testing. It’s a game-changing feature and we’re excited to see how you use it across your campaigns. Our next post will cover the best practices for A/B testing, and how customers have used it in their many different campaigns.
