Customize and personalize
A More Dynamic Experience
Millions of people visit Mozilla.com every month. Many visit in order to download Firefox, while others may search for Firefox updates, support information, or how to get involved with the Mozilla community. Up to now, we’ve treated every person visiting the Firefox download page in pretty much the same way: they all receive a message to download Firefox. Yet we know that a significant number of visitors (about 30%, or millions per month) to this page already have Firefox.
It’s time to talk to our site visitors in a more intelligent way. Enter a test program that we’re starting soon which dynamically displays content on the Firefox download page based on a visitor’s web browser. So a user with the latest version of Firefox won’t see information about downloading Firefox (they already have it!) and a user visiting without Firefox will be encouraged to get it. During the test, a sample of the visitors to the download page will see a test page (depending on their browser).
If you fall into the test group and you happen to have Internet Explorer, you’ll see the following (note that there may be a couple minor changes to the pages below before testing rolls-out):
You’ll notice that there is a link to “Switching Tips” to the right of the download button. In case a user is still not convinced to download Firefox, this page goes into more detail about the reasons to consider a switch:
If you are in the test group and visit with Firefox, you’ll see one of these pages–an “Upgrade” page for users that have a version of Firefox below 3.0 and a “Get Personal” page for users that have a version of Firefox above 3.0. The idea behind the latter is to showcase all of the ways that users can do more with Firefox–get an add-on, get involved in the community, tell a friend, etc:
In order to determine if we’re successful, we’ll be doing fairly straight-forward A/B testing. I’ve written about this type of website optimization before, but the basic mechanics of this test are to run different versions of the download page concurrently, and see which one improves our key metrics. For the IE page, that means monitoring conversion rate (Firefox downloads/Visitors to the download page) as compared to the current Firefox download page (also known as the “control”). For the Upgrade and Personalize pages, we’re analyzing the bounce rate of these pages (vs. the control) and the number of visitors that take an action (e.g., exploring add-ons or learning how to get involved with Spread Firefox).
A/B tests aren’t perfect, but they do allow you to measure visitor behavior under real conditions. Because we get so many visits to the Firefox download page, we have a very high likelihood of statistical significance in a very short period of time. And, while the pages we’re testing take some large departures from the current Firefox download page in terms of content and layout, they still feeling like they fit under the Mozilla.com site umbrella–important if we make these test pages a permanent part of mozilla.com. Doing this type of testing can be really impactful. For example, improving the conversion rate by just a few percentage points can result in incremental gains of millions of new downloads over the course of a year.
Since this is just a test, we’re going to be surfacing these test pages on the en-US site only. If the test improves conversion or user action, we’ll look to roll out dynamic content in other locales and other pages on Mozilla.com. Next phases of testing might include pages specific for other browsers beyond Internet Explorer. For example, a page specifically messaging Safari users. As a side note, we’re not collecting any information here beyond simply detecting what type of browser you have when you visit, in the same way that we make sure you receive the right version of Firefox whether you arrive on the download page with a Mac, a computer running windows or one with Linux. I’ll report on the results of the test in a future post.
Tags: dynamic content, firefox, firefox marketing, Internet Explorer, mozilla, mozilla.com, Website Optimization Discussion
9 comments for “A More Dynamic Experience”
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This is very cool…looking forward to seeing what the results look like.
That sounds like a fine idea…but I’d just like to make one small request: Don’t make it too hard to download Firefox with Firefox.
While I’m surely the minority, there are definitely times when I might be going to help a friend out with a flaky computer, and I want to download the latest copy of Firefox to my USB key to install on the troubled box. This download will likely be done with the latest copy of Firefox…the small hitch being that I didn’t necessarily download it, but rather…used the update functionality. I’d rather not have to go to the FTP mirrors to get it…so some kind of less-prominent, but still obvious, link would be appreciated.
Will Mozilla use a geolocation detection system like Google? For instance, I’m using an English version of Windows XP. Eventhough I use IE 6 or 7 (English, of course) to access “google.com”, it always redirect me to “google.com.vn” with the content displayed in Vietnamese(*).
If yes, then that’ll be really great, and I’m sure with you that more IE users from Vietnam will want to try Firefox right away
Hùng,
From the Vietnamese l10n team.
(*): Just works with google.com, though. When go directly to “gmail.com” or “google.com/notebook”, those pages are still displayed in English by default.
@John: Great point. You’ll notice that we’ve kept the download buttons on all of the pages so that you’ll still be able to download Firefox with Firefox.
The download box on the screenshots proposes Firefox for MacOSX to your IE6 visitor
The comparizon table compares Firefox 3 with IE7. IE6 shouldn’t have the “compatible with modern web pages and technologies” tick. Also, I think the IE6 logo should be used instead.
Another point, some people stick to IE6 because they are on windows 98 and we don’t support that platform, I don’t know if we can detect that via the user agent, but if this is indicated in IE6 UA, maybe we should give an optional proposal (like switching to Firefox 2.0.0.20 even though it’s no longer supported).
I did notice, though I was wondering if that’s significantly ‘below the fold.’ (Also, I just wanted be sure someone didn’t think “Why do we need to keep that link at all?”)
I considered ‘Upgrade’ to be a slight misnomer until I re-read your explanation and realized this is “for users that have a version of Firefox above 3.0.” I was thinking that it was for users who are running the most current copy. If such a page also existed, I might expect the heading to read ‘Download’ instead of ‘Upgrade.’
These semantics aside, it’s definitely a smart idea to give people more information on the software they’re running.
(Frivolous aside: I wonder if anyone looks at the page in Firefox and downloads it, not realizing they’re already running Firefox. I’d be willing to believe it happens sometimes.)
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