Bus station landing pages:
A strategic repositioning
2020 Case study
In the business of selling anything online, crafting the perfect vitirine for your product inevitably goes through the heavy competition of Google's SERPs. It's no different for bus tickets. At Busbud, one particular type of landing page had a long way to go to be on par with the highest converting pages on the site: The "Bus Station" pages.
Those pages detail crucial and tactical information about bus departures from and to various stations, schedules and possible amenities available for transiters. In terms of traffic, these pages were the 3rd most visited page type on the platform, yet were converting below 1% of visitors. We were looking at changing that.
Why might that be the case ?
In leading the team through this project, the first course of action was to investigate the underlying causes for this low conversation. Over a period of 3 weeks, we gathered feedback from close to 4000 participants from around the world who are using the platform. Here is what we found:
The original page experience focussed mostly on selling the bus tickets first...
The departures from the presented station, Port Authority NY, were secondary and very discreet. That section also only showed the next available departure.
... but users were actually expecting to see bus schedules, first and foremost.
The overwhelming majority of respondants were looking for some kind of information. Either the schedules or information about the station itself, such as amenities, business hours and access instructions.
"Users empowered with information relevant to their trip would be more likely to book a ticket."
This hypothesis guided the following strategic planning. Not only would validating this assumption lift conversion to booking by an estimated +6%, but would also increase traffic towards that page type by feeding the engine with actionable/visualizable information directly on Google results. We could also foresee an anticipated -3% drop in the bounce rate on those pages.
One strategic goal : Make the most relevant information actionable
In order for visitors to be engaged on the landing page, we not only must provide the right kind of information, but also make those actionable, so that the platform can accompany them beyond the passive reading and browsing phase.
The final solution
Most of the power of a landing page such as this one is its content. We reprioritized how the content would flow throughout the page, to tell a story of the experience visitors would go through and developed a layout around the 3 following pillars of that story:
1. Tailored content that showcases the variety of info type present on the page
2. Actionable 7-day schedule with specific real scheduled departures
3. Open-ended search to serve visitors that may not have found the departure they desired to book
Thank you for reading along!
