I'm in the process of consolidating several sites into one. Content that previously lived at http://example.co.uk/ will now live at http://example.com/uk/, content from http://example.fr/ will move to http://example.com/fr/, etc.
There are many technical reasons for making this change, but I'm coming up against opposition from local marketing teams who claim that having .co.uk or .fr (and consequently a national identity) in the URL has powerful emotive value for users, and that moving away from it will hurt adoption and conversion.
So I have four questions:
Has anyone ever had manage this type of transition?
Is there some reference data you found (or generated) that helped in your decision?
Can anyone suggest a reasonably practicable way that I might test the effect of a CCTLD on customer behaviour (without necessarily doing a site-wide A/B test)?
Or, can anyone recommend a reputable forum that's more focused on conversion rate and influencing factors?
Answer
I suggest running limited Google AdWords campaigns in the key markets testing CTR (Click Through Rate) with ads running in equal rotation with the 'Display URLs' of example.fr vs. example.com/fr.
Practicalities and cost of this will depend on your industry and organisation of course but you will need a temporary landing page on example.com, though it can just link through to the local site.
AdWords rules on display URLs here; http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=175906
I expect given the small variance the Top Level Domain will drive you will need at least a couple of hundred clicks to see an appreciable difference. If you don't reach a significant result, that's also the answer you need.
No comments:
Post a Comment