This was a case study i’ve been waiting to do for over a year! Approx a year ago i found this really neat image showing 2 different ways a car dealership was collecting online leads. Both lead capture methods were through online ‘forms’, but both the forms we’re worded differently.

Form1 = your normal form
..with fields stacked on top of each other asking for your name, address, email etc…

Form2 = a mad lib form.
ie: Hi my name is ______, i’m interested in a 2011 Honda Civic at <Dealership Name>, my address is _________, please call me back at ___ ___ ___.

So 2 months ago i finally got to put mad libs to the test with a younger demographic and it completely destroyed the other more general looking form! We’re talking 2x the conversion rate. The campaign was for a younger demo with not a lot of competition, so i still wanted to know how mad libs would do in a serious competitive niche!

So just for my inquisitive mind and for the blog i decided to see exactly how mad lib style forms stack up in competitive niches against their ‘normal form’ counterparts. The niche i went with was auto insurance as i have some experience with it.

I used 2 traffic sources, Facebook being one of them which made up for 80% of the volume. I targeted the US, males 25-35. I used my own auto insurance landing page, and then split it to the 2 different form pages. From there the leads collected went into an excel file.

Just to recap, the landing page format was like this:
(page1)Auto Insurance page –> (page2)Normal Insurance Landing Page
(page1)Auto Insurance page –>  (page2)Mad Lib Style Insurance Landing Page

I took the generic form from a current auto insurer and duplicated it, while removing logo’s and other trademarked items. I then recreated the same style page into a mad libs format. To keep it completely fair i kept all the same fields that were being requested from the first form.

> Normal Insurance Landing Page

> Mad Lib Style Insurance Landing Page

Insurance companies reading this? Take note for what your about to see! As for affiliates, it’s time to take this info and finally launch that long term email campaign you’ve been thinking about.

THE RESULTS!

Normal = 14% Conversion Rate

Mad Lib = 21% Conversion Rate

50% Improvement in conversions with this style of lead capture.

This was for a total of 34 conversions. The conversion rates above are for when people land on the 2nd page!

My page was a bit messy, with better optimization & organization i think the conversion rate would have been even higher.

You can get VERY creative with these mad lib formatted landing pages. This is a more basic format of the mad lib style pages. With one I’m using in another campaign with a younger demo i’m able to have a lot more fun with it and i saw higher than 50% increase in conversion.