When you step into a meeting about optimizing conversion on your website, you’re probably thinking about pricing pages, home pages, use case pages, the blog…that sort of thing.

You probably don’t think about your navigation bar all too often. And if you do, you probably don’t change it very often. You are, more likely than not, running the same navbar you built out all those years ago. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Right?

Not if Kirsty Finlayson, Head of Marketing at Chameleon, has anything to say about it.

Chameleon had a problem: Their conversion path was too restrictive. And most of their great content, of which they had lots, was hidden. Nobody was reading it. Prospective customers would waltz into sales calls totally unaware of Chameleon’s biggest selling points. It hurt conversion, and it put the burden on the sales team to educate customers about Chameleon’s key value props.

The hypothesis was incredibly simple.

The theory, Kirsty says, was that “if we expanded our navbar, more users would interact with [our content], go on to learn more about what Chameleon is, and they’d make more informed demo sign-ups.”

But navbars are sacred. Marketers don’t like to mess with them. So, the challenge was to figure out how to adjust the navbar without negatively impacting conversion.

Validate assumptions about current user behavior

Before making any changes, Kirsty wanted to verify her assumptions. She did this in a couple of ways:

• Hotjar recordings: These clips showed lots of U-turns – visitors dropping in on a page, but not clicking any of the pages Chameleon had worked hard to create. It was discouraging, Kirsty says. People simply weren’t exploring the site.

• Google Analytics metrics: Most people were bouncing right off of Chameleon’s most important pages. And very few of them were discovering some of Chameleon’s strongest content.

Crucially, Kirsty also noticed that people were converting extremely well from Chameleon’s features pages. So while not many people were finding those pages, the people that did would often convert.

A/B test changes to the navbar 

Kirsty used Mutiny to A/B test navbar changes. Here’s what their control looked like:

And here’s what a version of the test navbar looked like:

Kirsty began with adding a Use Cases dropdown, then expanded to include things like Integrations.

She wasn’t testing at random. Each addition to the navbar was designed to highlight already-existing content. If something new made it onto the Chameleon navbar, it was there because Kirsty thought it’d better-educate customers and improve overall conversion.

(Meaning, if you try this on your own, the things you add to your navbar may be different than the things Kirsty added to hers.)

With Mutiny’s statistical significance metrics, Kirsty was confident in each change she made.

Learn from Lukas at Contractbook how he got a 971% lift in conversion by overhauling their pricing page.