Here's what I find really surprising: Making the word "Free" in the call-to-action much less prominent did not reduce conversion by very much.
The original page prominently says: "Sign up for a free trial" and gets a 6.9% conversion from visitor to trial user.
The new page unprominently says: "Money back guarantee" and "Free Sign Up" in the top right corner. Conversion is 5.2%, which is almost the same considering the scope of the change, even though there was much less use of the word "Free".
This is surprising in itself.
I'm also curious about how the next stage of the funnel is converting users from the trial to entering their credit cards.
Also you say that credit card signup is not mandatory. When does the CC enter the picture? Does the service wait a while (e.g. one month ) and ask you to enter you credit card? How does this compare to taking a credit-card upfront and offering a one-month money-back guarantee?
I don't want to be pedantic, but 25% fewer conversions is not "almost the same", it's quite the loss. You need to increase your funnel 33% somewhere down the line to make up for it (which I'm sure they did - I'm just making the point that X% -> X-d% is significant if X and d are small).
Depends if you're maximising for revenue or signups. The number of signups decreased but the revenue increased significantly, making up for the loss in signups. Of course if you can increase signups now with the new pricing then that would also show revenue increase.
I think this might be because of the product. Most people probably don't want free server monitoring, as the perceived reliability and performance would be worse.
The original page prominently says: "Sign up for a free trial" and gets a 6.9% conversion from visitor to trial user.
The new page unprominently says: "Money back guarantee" and "Free Sign Up" in the top right corner. Conversion is 5.2%, which is almost the same considering the scope of the change, even though there was much less use of the word "Free".
This is surprising in itself.
I'm also curious about how the next stage of the funnel is converting users from the trial to entering their credit cards.
Also you say that credit card signup is not mandatory. When does the CC enter the picture? Does the service wait a while (e.g. one month ) and ask you to enter you credit card? How does this compare to taking a credit-card upfront and offering a one-month money-back guarantee?