Optimizing Skype.com for growth and sales

UPDATE: A Skype executive asked Omniture to ask Skype Journal to take down this post, said Kristi Knight, Omniture senior director of corporate communications. "It was information that wasn't meant to be made available to the general public" said Brian Watkins, Omniture's public relations manager. Omniture removed the Skype part of the webinar from the site after an employee accidentally sent a link to it to prospective customers in an email prospectus. Skype gave permission to use their story at The Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City this past February, a closed pre-sales pitch and customer education event. Someone at Skype was apparently very upset that this high level case showed up on our blog; enough to persuade Omniture to take a PR hit.

Before I explain what I'm going to do, let me explain why this information is blogworthy, maybe even newsworthy.

Skype Journal helps its readers understand the Skype universe. Skype's product features, business model, financials, performance, product strategy, technology, user stories, design philosophies, and everything that explains this rapidly changing, growing, influential company. This ongoing Skype story affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Today's story shows Skype uses state of the art practices to get more out of each customer visit. This is not rocket science (social science, actually) and we'd expect to learn a little about the active management of one of the most visited sites on Earth.

While the information was released by accident, it was released nevertheless. As a courtesy, I'm removing the slide screenshots. 

The post:

Omniture helps web sites get visitors to act by testing variations on a web page's design. (Omniture has a pretty great home page.) Skype.com was featured in a workshop that showed tests comparing different home page and returning page layouts and content. The slides are from a pre-sales briefing but they offer some insight into Skype's day-to-day operations.

The overall goals: improve downloads and sales by adding or subtracting "branding" intensity.

Test one was for the Skype.com home page:

Three versions of the page are offered randomly to users, their behavior is logged and compared. In this case, A was heavily branded (more screen space devoted to art, people, and slogans.

1A was the existing design, "Heavily Branded," used as a control. About half of the page was a large horizontal block with a lifestyle photo showing a young couple on a swing, a screenshot of Skype for Mac contacts list, and a "Download Skype" button.

1B was simpler, with a lighter branding touch. Everything "below the fold" was cleared off, the screenshot removed, and the lifestyle photo down to half its previous size. The number of words on the page was cut in half. 

1C was very light, no photography or screenshots, word count cut in half again, focused on the transaction ("Get Skype Now").

Test 1 showed less is more with newbies. Recipe B improved click throughs by 1.4%. Recipe C increased downloads 4.6%. If all you want to do is drive new visitors to download, then simple, elegant, and focused could work.

This adds up. By constantly optimizing site design, Skype's visits to download.Skype.com rose 235.76 % year/year, twice as fast as visits to www.Skype.com, which rose 93.59 % in the same time according to Compete.com. More than 3 million people visit Skype.com monthly, and most of them land on the home page.

So Skype is now doing a better job of converting prospects into users of free Skype services.

What's the best way to convert users of free into paying customers? Skype uses a landing page for returning users. 

For test 2, can design alternatives improve the sale of minutes and gear? Again, three flavors of the same page. 

2A is the control again, minutes in a big, dark Skype Pro block on the left, a Phillip cordless phone package ad on the right. Below the fold was a row with "download Skype" and "Skype SMS" ads, and a row with three columns beneath that with seven different offers for gear and services.

2B is all about the minutes. The dark "Skype Pro" block is lightened and expanded to two-thirds width of the page. To the block's right are Skype Credit and SkypeIn links. Gear ads below the fold were cut to three bigger ones with photos. 

2C also de-cluttered like 2B. The right hand credit and SkypeIn ads swapped places with below-the-fold gear ads.

Unlike the home page test, the results were mixed and had no confidence score. 

So they dug deeper by seeing how different segments behaved. 

It turned out that weekday users liked 2C a lot, improving click-throughs by nearly 14%. However weekend users disliked 2B and 2C so much they offset weekday users.

Segments behave differently, even when you compare something as mundane as day-of-week. So the big lesson is to test how customer segments react to design ideas. 

I haven't really thought of Skype.com as a product, but it's clearly part of the Skype experience and contributes directly to Skype's growth, customer retention, and sales.

tags: skype, design, testing, omniture, home page, landing page, statistics, trends, growth

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

see also: flickr photo set