How SaferVPN achieved a swift conversion rate increase with Trustpilot

On the 16th of September 2019, Google changed the review Review Snippet guidelines which are outlined in this blog. Here's what you need to know:

• SEO Service Review TrustBoxes no longer display Review Snippet stars (this impacts service reviews from all providers, not just Trustpilot).

• Product Review SEO TrustBoxes and Google Seller Ratings (GSRs) aren't affected by this change.

• Business Profile pages on Trustpilot.com will still display Review Snippet stars. If you'd like to find out more, please read Trustpilot's explanatory blog post.

By testing and developing a customised widget using the Trustpilot API and adding Rich Snippets stars, SaferVPN shows how to make the most of Trustpilot reviews

Recognising the huge global demand for smart, effective, and accessible internet security, SaferVPN has quickly established itself as a leader in the Internet security and privacy field by developing innovative, intuitively designed apps that deliver instant 256-bit encrypted VPN (Virtual Private Network) protection across the planet for businesses and individual consumers. It has also made a name for itself in the industry for offering Automatic Wi-Fi Security, a solution that automatically activates VPN security as soon as a person’s mobile device connects to unsecured public Wi-Fi - even if the phone is inside their pocket and locked.

The strength of SaferVPN’s product has seen the company achieve extremely impressive growth in a very short time. Like most businesses looking to capitalise on early success, SaferVPN needed to develop its brand, drive more traffic to its website, optimise online visibility, and improve conversion rates.

Why SaferVPN Chose Trustpilot

As a young company with a growing and enthusiastic customer-base, SaferVPN knew that leveraging word-of-mouth endorsements to increase customer confidence and enhance visibility should be a priority.

SaferVPN’s service revolves around trust. This meant that trust needed to play a part in marketing and customer success. By recognising how vital customer feedback could bein driving more traffic to the website and increasing conversion rates, SaferVPN identified Trustpilot as the perfect partner.

“We wanted to make sure we found a trustworthy, reliable review platform that was easy for our customers to use.We conducted extensive research online, and the best solution we found was Trustpilot.” -- Shira Siegel, Inbound Marketing Manager at SaferVPN

Trustpilot’s reputation for great customer service was a key factor in SaferVPN’s decision to work with Trustpilot, as Inbound Marketing Manager Shira Siegel explains:

“We wanted to work with a company with excellent customer service. Trustpilot fulfilled all our requirements! Our customer success manager, Leonardo Cerquiglini, has exceeded our expectations by helping us immensely throughout the entire process thus far. His data insights and support have made working with Trustpilot an exceptional experience.”

SaferVPN came to Trustpilot with three main objectives:

1. Obtain customer feedback and drive more traffic to the website

2. Increase conversion rates on top performing pages

3. Increase CTR and SEO ranking on top pages using review snippets

How SaferVPN Achieved a 13.39% Conversion Rate Increase with Trustpilot

SaferVPN’s experience is a good illustration of how Trustpilot can be customised to match unique business challenges and achieve optimised results.

Improving Conversion Rates - Take One

Using a predefined horizontal TrustBox, SaferVPN started an A/B test that placed the TrustBox on three popular pages: the homepage, the pricing page, and the free trial page.

After two weeks of running the experiment, test results showed a statistically significant decrease of 4.26% in conversions using the TrustBox.

Improving Conversion Rates - Take two

Having considered what might be contributing to the underwhelming results, SaferVPN decided to isolate the experiment to just one page – the pricing page – and develop a customised widget using the Trustpilot API. The new widget was tailored to closely align with existing on-page design, ensuring a seamless but eye-catching integration.

The second, isolated experiment quickly yielded significantly improved results, delivering an impressive 13.39% conversion rate increase on the pricing page in just two weeks.

And the good news didn’t end there. SaferVPN also found that click-through rates and Google rankings improved with the addition of the customised Trustpilot widget.

How Review Snippets Helped SaferVPN Drive 30% More Traffic to Key Pages

After the success of their customised Trustpilot widget experiment, SaferVPN decided to mark-up several key pages for Review Snippets.

The Windows app page was among the pages SaferVPN chose to mark-up for their Review Snippets experiment. You can see how the Trustpilot-enhanced listing looks in Google below.

Over the course of a two-week test, SaferVPN found that, with the addition of Review Snippet stars, their Windows app saw a massive 30% increase in overall traffic. Another great outcome!

Further Improving Results Using Trustpilot

As the results make clear, with a few tweaks, Trustpilot has helped to improve conversion rates and CTR on SaferVPN’s test pages. The help and the support of dedicated customer success managers proved invaluable throughout the testing process, and they will provide further support on how to best utilise Trustpilot. The next step will be to build on these successful tests by adding the customised Trustpilot widget to other key landing pages and tracking the effect.

SaferVPN’s methodical approach shows that testing and customisation can help any company achieve excellent results with Trustpilot.

Using Review Snippets to Increase Conversions and Better Educate Potential Customers

By using structured data to mark-up pages, you can help search engines like Google and Bing to understand and index information for a search engine results page (SERP) display and in so doing, make your website stand out from the crowd.

If you’re using Trustpilot, you can implement Review Snippets so your pages display your ratings and reviews, complete with an eye-catching star rating graphic.

The addition of a Trustpilot review score to key pages is a great way to inspire trust and engage prospective customers by giving them useful information the moment they encounter your listing in the SERPs. It can be a simple but effective way to improve search visibility and increase click-through rates.