12 real CRO case studies & examples for 2025 (with results)

This is the sort of detail that conversion rate optimization helps you uncover. 

If you worked in the SaaS space, you’d know that paid ads may not be the strongest driver. Instead, you could divert more of your marketing energies into email campaigns that get the results you’re after.  

Before we dive into the full case studies, here’s a quick look at some impressive CRO wins we’ll be exploring in detail:

• Going doubled premium trial starts with a simple A/B test, achieving a 104% month-over-month increase just by changing their CTA button text.
• World of Wonder boosted RuPaul’s Drag Race conversions by nearly 20% using AI optimization tools, with their streaming service conversion rate climbing to 29.7%.
• New Balance Chicago drove 200% more in-store sales by creating mobile-optimized landing pages that connected digital ads to physical store visits.
• Broomberg captured 72% more blog leads by adding strategically timed pop-ups to their content after 100 seconds on page.
• Later crushed industry benchmarks with a 60% average conversion rate on their gated content landing pages, generating over 100,000 new leads.
• Taylor Made Marketing regularly achieves 35% conversion rates in the home improvement sector—compared to the industry average of just 3-5%.

These examples show what’s possible when you apply smart CRO techniques to your marketing. Now, let’s break down these success stories and more in detail.

Use these success stories as inspiration for your next CRO test. The case studies below cover plenty of types of A/B tests, CRO experiments, and more.

Going is a small yet scrappy company dedicated to helping travelers see more of the world for less. Signing up for Going gives access to an alert service that tells travelers when awesome flight deals are available at their local airport. But how do you get this service into the hands of the people who’ll get the most out of it?

A key part of Going’s business model is giving users a taste of what the service offers. There are two free ways to try out their service:

• Sign up for a free plan with limited features
• Sign up for a free, two-week trial of a premium paid plan. 

The company had a hunch that users would love the premium plan if they saw its value for themselves—and be more likely to sign up after the trial. That meant it was time to start CRO testing to see what messaging would work.

A/B testing is a great way to test messaging, letting page copy variations compete to win clicks and attention. Going set up an A/B test of their own, creating page variants in Unbounce’s landing page builder to see what messaging worked best. 

They tried two CTA variants: 

• “Sign up for free” focused on the free service tier
• “Trial for free” focused on the premium service tier

As results came in, the Going team dug into the data to determine which option performed better and would have the greatest impact on their conversion rate. 

The shorter CTA won big, with a 104% month-over-month increase in premium trial start rates. The findings from this simple A/B test let Going boost its paid channel conversion rate, which is now higher than organic channels—a huge win for the company. 

A/B testing is one of the simplest forms of CRO testing, but it’s an amazing way to test messages in the wild to see what resonates best with the audience. This enables strategic, data-driven decisions that maximize marketing ROI. 

Read the full case study.

World of Wonder is the production company behind the hit series RuPaul’s Drag Race, as well as RuPaul’s DragCon and the Drag Defense Fund, in partnership with the ACLU. This team is busy making awesome stuff, so there’s not always time for them to tackle CRO initiatives. 

World of Wonder wanted to improve bounce rates and conversion rates on their existing landing pages, but with one catch—they had limited time and resources to put into their optimization efforts. 

Through its marketing efforts, the company wanted to create buzz and excitement for live events, drive streaming service sign-ups, and improve brand awareness. However, manual optimization resources were in short supply, making it harder to analyze the ideas and data needed for effective CRO testing.

Enter AI optimization tools. These tools evaluate visitor behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns by assessing historical conversion data, letting users dynamically personalize content elements based on these characteristics. 

Because they used Unbounce’s AI conversion optimization tools, spinning up variants for rapid A/B testing was as easy as pressing a button. These tools automated what would otherwise be a tedious, time-consuming process, allowing the team to move forward with important projects without getting caught in the weeds of intense CRO detail.

Across the board, whether for event registration, brand awareness plays, or streaming service sign-ups, World of Wonder had a 19.7% increase in conversion lift across all pages where they employed AI optimization. 

For comparison, the median conversion rate for entertainment landing pages is around 12.3%:

Digging into the numbers for each page, it’s even more impressive: 

• Conversion rate on DragCon UK event leads rose from 12.7% to 31.9% 
• Overall conversion rate of 54.1% for a Las Vegas live show
• Streaming service conversion rate grew to 29.7%

Best of all, this was accomplished with minimal effort from the World of Wonder staff. AI marketing tools are a great way to support or build on existing work, freeing up more time to focus on what really needs your attention. 

Read the full case study.

Most marketers’ big conversion goal is getting customers to buy online. That’s not the case with New Balance Chicago, where ecommerce traffic doesn’t always translate into in-person business. They needed a way to get feet through their doors (and into some rad shoes). 

Because New Balance Chicago stores are owned and operated as family businesses, they don’t have the marketing budget or ecommerce integration of their parent company. 

Online sales only generate a small portion of profits, so retailers’ primary goal is to get people through the door to make an in-person purchase. But how do you use digital tactics to generate in-store traffic?

New Balance Chicago teamed up with Matchnode, a marketing agency, and dove into the challenge. Matchnode started with a Facebook ad campaign but had the ads drive clicks to custom, mobile-responsive landing pages built with Unbounce. 

Those landing pages used the national New Balance website as a starting point for offline conversion optimization. They used the familiar design but focused on Chicago store locations, offers, and exclusive in-store benefits. These landing pages let them capture email addresses and segment their audience while automating the delivery of highly personalized offers.  

New Balance Chicago grew their email list by over 10% within two months. Reminder emails encouraging leads to claim their discounts had open rates 5-10% higher than their regular promotion emails.

That’s not all—by optimizing Facebook ad spend for landing pages, the Matchnode team reduced those costs by 50%. With ad clicks sending people to dedicated landing pages, New Balance Chicago saw 200% more in sales compared to past campaigns. 

Read the full case study.

Pop-ups can be controversial for marketers and customers alike. Still, when executed well, they can deliver incredible results. Just ask Broomberg, a home cleaning and maintenance service. 

Beyond home cleaning services, Broomberg offers painting and maintenance services. But more services mean more competition. Running paid ads can get expensive fast, especially when all your competitors are chasing bottom-funnel keywords that are more likely to convert. 

So, how do you stay budget-conscious while ensuring maximum impact?

Instead of bidding on the same bottom-funnel PPC keywords everyone else was, Broomberg took a different approach: creating really good top-funnel content. 

The sales cycle can be long for services like home painting or floor restoration. Customers spend a ton of time researching what they want and need before deciding. 

In three months, their top-of-funnel, informational blog posts pulled in 41% of the traffic that PPC brought in on key topics. That’s free traffic—no need for PPC. 

Converting that traffic into leads and sales was trickier. Broomberg incorporated contact forms into the posts, but they didn’t capture too many leads. 

After some heat map testing, they realized visitors were so interested in reading the blogs that they didn’t notice the forms. 

That’s when they decided to try a simple pop-up offer, triggered after a user spent 100 seconds on the page—close to the average time their users spent on-page. All a user had to do was share their phone number. 

The results were impressive: In two months, Broomberg saw a 72% increase in total relevant blog leads from pop-ups. 

That’s not all—pop-up leads also accounted for:

• 27% of total leads in painting services
• 23% of total leads in flooring restoration

Boosting Broomberg’s conversion rate meant thinking outside the box and taking a different approach to a common problem. They drove incredible success by focusing on adding value for their customers and zeroing in on user experience. Maybe pop-ups aren’t so controversial after all.

Read the full case study.

DoctorBase, now part of the Kareo Marketing platform, lets patients communicate directly with doctors online. Only one problem: after overcoming huge hurdles to work in the medical industry, they had limited resources to market to and recruit doctors and patients. 

Because their developers were hyper-focused on the mission-critical product, the company’s marketing team was stuck driving (impressive) traffic to landing pages they couldn’t alter themselves. As a result, conversions were low, and marketing effectiveness suffered. 

Kareo Marketing needed a way to tweak landing pages and fine-tune messaging, offers, and targeting to boost the conversion rate and keep things running. 

Kareo Marketing’s obvious solution was to turn to Unbounce for help with their landing page headaches. Unbounce let them rapidly create the LPs they needed without removing developer resources from the core product. 

The team rebuilt their doctor sign-up forms in minutes to replace the old forms and started diverting leads there. They built what they needed in-house, within their marketing department—no developers required. 

With the tools in place, they shifted their focus to conversion rate optimization and ran a few A/B tests to see what they’d learn. The results were a revelation.

The most immediate change was that the new form had an impressive 31% conversion rate. But the tests were eye-opening: they had too many fields in their new doctor sign-up forms. 

By cutting the number of fields, Kareo Marketing was able to increase the number of new physicians by 30%. It’s remarkable that one simple A/B test over the number of form fields increased yearly revenue by $1.56 million and improved marketing ROI by 40%.

Removing those friction points led to impressive results—and all it took was implementing tools anyone on the marketing team could use. 

Read the full case study.

Campaign Monitor’s email marketing tools make it easier for businesses to connect with their audience with intuitive insights and automation. Learn how they transformed hundreds of abandoning visitors into leads in one month. 

Campaign Monitor wanted to increase customer sign-ups but looked to leverage their existing content. The goal was to drive conversions by optimizing existing content, especially on the most-exited pages.

The marketers at Campaign Monitor decided to use pop-ups to promote key pieces of content, particularly a high-performing guide to email marketing. They turned to Unbounce’s customizable building tools to quickly create compelling messages around this existing resource. 

They understood that this piece was most likely to appeal to their visitors in the research and discovery phase who weren’t ready to sign up yet but were still interested in learning more. This kept users in the funnel longer and, thus, more likely to sign up. 

The results were remarkable. By targeting exit intent, Campaign Monitor’s top-performing pop-up achieved a 10.8% conversion rate, capturing 271 new leads in one month. 

Those are users that would have otherwise bounced, too. The best part? This was all accomplished without any new content. Promoting content you’ve already made is an overlooked way to generate traffic and leads while maintaining impressive marketing ROI. 

Read the full case study.

With over 160 franchise locations worldwide, music educators School of Rock wanted to drive student enrollment through marketing and advertising efforts. After a poor experience with a specialized PPC agency, they turned to the agency RevUnit for help.  

Everyone wants a better conversion rate at a lower acquisition cost. Still, for School of Rock and RevUnit, it was non-negotiable. PPC spending was on overdrive, with plenty of room for ROI improvement. After all, advertising for 160 locations worldwide adds up quickly. 

When RevUnit came in, they audited existing campaigns and identified common mistakes and inconsistencies throughout:

• Slow-loading pages that negatively affected user experience
• Long lead forms that added friction
• Information-dense copy that didn’t tell a compelling story
• Poor matching between ad and landing page copy
• Frustrating tracking issues 

They knew addressing these problems would generate better results—but they didn’t want to implement sweeping changes to 160 pages without testing first.

The RevUnit team set about building a template landing page with Unbounce. They quickly established the shortest path to conversion while highlighting strong, clear copy that delivered the information visitors needed without overloading them. 

They used this template as a pilot for School of Rock’s landing pages—and it generated a 75% increase in average weekly conversions and a 50% decrease in cost per conversion. 

Talk about great results! The next steps were to roll this template out to drive similar results across more than 160 other landing pages. Even with the right conversion formula, that’s a ton of work. 

Instead, RevUnit used dynamic text replacement to match ads with the right landing page based on visitor location and the keywords they were searching for. 

By using dynamic content, RevUnit and School of Rock were able to rapidly update and roll out pages, ensuring users were sent to the relevant location for relevant content. What’s more, they could route leads to each franchise automatically. 

School of Rock’s monthly conversions increased by 250%, five times what they had before CRO testing. Even better, the cost per conversion dropped by 82%, representing a huge improvement in ad spend ROI. 

The takeaways here are that a data-driven approach to optimizing landing pages will always beat throwing more money at a problem. What’s more, thinking outside the box and focusing on automation and efficiency in your process can help you uncover massive wins for your own CRO testing. 

Read the full case study.

Indochino, the world’s largest made-to-measure apparel company, innovated its industry to massive success. Decidedly non-traditional, they wanted to rethink their advertising approach. 

The company had the resources to enable big ad budgets, but they knew money alone wouldn’t guarantee success. Indochino understood the need for a compelling, engaging landing page to guide visitors to convert. Still, they simply didn’t have it plotted out. 

With the opening of new showrooms, they needed to get location-specific content in front of customers quickly, but they had limited development resources to do so. 

Finally, partner promotions and events highlighted the need for fast, agile landing page creation. When setting up time-sensitive events, you need things up and running fast. 

Like other brands, Indochino was running Facebook ads, but they knew they needed to drive them to something more than a blog or specific webpage. 

Instead of the traditional above-the-fold offer and benefit, supporting copy to argue why, and a handy form to claim an offer, they focused on an editorial-style article discussing the value of a tailored suit. 

It was a unique way of guiding users to convert: focus on value and information first, expanding the pitch into an experience that felt as customized as their product. 

Unbounce’s landing page tools let them build pages quickly without leaning on overtaxed development teams. What’s more, they were able to create all the location-specific material they needed within their marketing team, all at a speed and scale that meant they could take on more time-sensitive offers and partnerships. 

In just nine months, Indochino earned over 800 new showroom bookings, sold 40 made-to-measure suits, and generated over 750 newsletter sign-ups. 

They did it all with tailored content and advertising. There are so many ways to get creative with landing pages to help you meet your goals—you’d be amazed at what you can accomplish when you zig instead of zag. 

Read the full case study.

SaaS company Thinkific provides software for creating and selling online courses. It saw explosive growth over a few years–quickly moving from startup to industry leader. With fast-paced growth comes the need to scale marketing efforts equally. 

Company growth is about staying nimble and moving quickly, especially for SaaS businesses. The market and strategies always change, and every growth stage brings new challenges. 

For Thinkific, this meant keeping the top of the marketing funnel full and running campaigns almost nonstop. 

But even with that intense demand, they needed to be able to track results effectively to ensure they were using their resources efficiently.  

Using Unbounce, Thinkific published over 700 landing pages in under two years, testing and refining different tactics to target various customer segments. 

This extensive use of landing pages let them accelerate growth while tailoring their messaging to each initiative and need. 

Those 700 landing pages have driven more than 150,000 conversions—and that’s not all. 

In just over two weeks, the company drove 600 new customers to sign up for Thinkific Pro, doubling traffic and conversion rates from the previous year—a massive success for a single campaign!

They’ve also seen a 50% conversion rate on webinar landing pages, with a recent online summit boasting 10,000 registrants and participants. 

Thinkific hasn’t stopped moving, testing, and iterating ideas, all made possible with easy-to-use and easier-to-create landing pages.

Read the full case study.

Hotjar’s marketing technology is widely known and widely used—their website heatmaps and behavior analytics mean they understand what people are looking at, why they’re drawn to it, and what you can do to reach them. They put their insights to work when it was time to generate more trial sign-ups. 

When assessing ways to reach out to their customers, Hotjar understood that how you do so is as important as when and where. They wanted to make sure that their efforts to increase conversions wouldn’t annoy or deter any visitors. 

Focusing on the pricing page, Hotjar chose to implement a single, simple pop-up. The pop-up offered visitors an ebook resource in exchange for their name and email—no extra form fields to worry about.

What’s more, the pop-up would only appear to first-time page visitors who were about to exit. The key was that Hotjar didn’t want it to seem like they were badgering users who were only in the research phase of the buying process. 

But that was just one way they optimized their approach to conversions—visitors who submitted the pop-up form received an email with their ebook and an exclusive 30-day free subscription to Hotjar’s top-shelf product. 

HotJar generated 403 leads in just three weeks and converted 3% into new trial sign-ups. They estimate they get around 70 new leads a month from this pop-up alone.

Experimenting with pop-ups was a new addition to Hotjar’s lead generation strategy, an effort to nurture new leads from various channels and keep them coming back. It shows that popups can see incredible success when implemented thoughtfully and strategically.

Read the full case study.

Like other high-growth SaaS businesses, social media marketing platform Later needed to maintain a steady flow of leads for the top of their sales funnel. They knew they had amazing content and marketing materials—but getting them to work to their benefit was another matter.  

100,000 leads is a big number and a big goal. The good news was that Later’s blog alone was regularly generating over a million visitors—but how do you transform visitors into leads? 

With a small creative team and limited development resources, they thought it would be an uphill battle—until they got in touch with Unbounce.  

Later’s approach was to test out what would happen if they pointed blog traffic towards landing pages that shared awesome content, like exclusive webinars and ebooks. 

They did this with help from Unbounce’s drag-and-drop landing page builder and quick-start templates. 

The pages gated the content behind a simple contact form. This form allowed Later to gather information on their audience to better understand them, in turn letting them build more tailored marketing efforts. 

The focus was on delivering high-value, useful content that their readers wanted. Building landing pages around these offers was easy because they already had so much in place, highlighting what a reader would get out of the resource in question. 

With their landing pages, Later was able to drive over 100,000 new leads thanks to landing pages with an average conversion rate of 60%. 

That’s a staggeringly high number, considering the benchmark median for SaaS conversions is a modest 3.0% (and across all industries, 4.6%). 

The takeaway? Leveraging exclusive content that your audience wants pays off big time. Being able to steadily generate valuable content and gate it behind a simple landing page is an amazing way to start generating leads. 

Read the full case study.

The traditional approach to building and testing landing pages is to build a few, A/B test them over weeks or months, and then implement the results from the best-performing page. Simply rinse and repeat. 

It’s a tried-and-true approach, but Taylor Made Marketing understood that, like CRO testing stresses, just because it works doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. 

The traditional approach to CRO simply wasn’t going to cut it for a business with clients throughout the United States. It was slow and tedious, and the increases they achieved were minimal. 

Taylor Made Marketing understood they needed a way to get a leg up and deliver results that would matter to their clients. 

Using AI tools and technology allowed Taylor Made Marketing to test multiple pages simultaneously—in some cases, up to 12 running at once—to see which converted the highest. 

Because AI removes the tedious, manual analysis and isolation, Taylor Made Marketing could quickly see what messages, layouts, and tactics worked best. They did this with Smart Traffic, which uses machine learning to detect traffic patterns and automatically route visitors to the page they’re most likely to convert on. 

You read that right—Taylor Made Marketing now regularly drives 35% conversion rates in the home improvement sector. 

By comparison, the average is a modest 3-5%. 

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to CRO. You need to consistently test to figure out what works best. Leveraging new technologies that streamline the tedious stuff is a great way to improve your conversion rate optimization efforts. 

Read the full case study.