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Send main CTA directly to SaaS trial form, skipping SaaS vs. self-hosted decision page

Danielle Morrill requested to merge dmor-homepage-cta-trial into master

Why is this change being made?

Currently trials are down significantly, and we have identified several steps in the trial signup process that add friction for visitors to GitLab.com

  1. Clicking on this CTA currently sends them to https://about.gitlab.com/free-trial/ where the user must then decide between self-managed or SaaS
  2. Clicking on the SaaS trial option places the user into a product growth experiment which forces them through additional product steps before they complete the signup form
  3. It is known that this has reduced conversion rate by ~7%, and this issue details the problem more fully gitlab-org/gitlab#240917 (closed)

My recommendation is that until we can figure out what is going on with trials, a much smaller subset of GitLab.com trial signups should be going through this experiment.

For the core CTAs on our website, it would be better for them to go directly to the form to avoid this friction and be excluded from the experiment set.

Author Checklist

  • Provided a concise title for the MR
  • Added a description to this MR explaining the reasons for the proposed change, per [say-why-not-just-what][transparency]
  • Assign this change to the correct DRI
    • If the DRI for the page/s being updated isn’t immediately clear, then assign it to your manager.
    • If your manager does not have merge rights, please ask someone to merge it AFTER it has been approved by your manager in [#mr-buddies][mr-buddies-slack].
    • If the changes relate to any part of the project other than updates to content and/or data files please make sure to ping @gl-static-site-editor in a comment for a review and merge. For example changes to .gitlab-ci.yml, JavaScript/CSS/Ruby code or the layout files.
Edited by Danielle Morrill

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