How adding a teaser for an offer in the middle of an article can impact conversion.
Focus on the Family
Focus on the Family is a global Christian ministry dedicated to helping families thrive. We provide help and resources for couples to build healthy marriages that reflect God's design, and for parents to raise their children according to morals and values grounded in biblical principles.
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 01/30/2018 - 02/23/2018
Focus on the Family gets significant traffic to their marriage articles. Through a series of testing, we have found that putting a free Marriage Assessment offer at the end of article pages can increase name acquisition. To build upon these learnings, we hypothesized that adding a small teaser about the marriage assessment in the middle of the article might help increase conversion for the marriage assessment. To test this, we set up three variables for the experiment. One tested adding a teaser and linking people directly to the marriage assessment and the other treatment tested adding a teaser that jump down to the bottom of the article where the marriage assessment feature was and took them to the assessment.
Research Question
Would a teaser mid-article increase conversion for the marriage assessment?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | No Teaser | 2.7% | ||
| T1: | Teaser w/ Direct Link | 2.9% | 5.8% | 99.9% |
| T2: | Teaser w/ Inline Link | 2.8% | 2.7% | 89.1% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 126,010 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 774,569, and the level of confidence is above 95% the experiment results are valid.
Flux Metrics Affected
The Flux Metrics analyze the three primary metrics that affect revenue (traffic, conversion rate, and average gift). This experiment produced the following results:
0% increase in traffic
× 5.8% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
Adding the mid-article marriage assessment teaser not only increased the number of people getting to the assessment, but also the number of people completing the assessment. When we linked the mid-article teaser to the assessment feature at the bottom of the article we increased people getting to the assessment by 3.6% (99.3% valid) and increased assessment completion by 2.7% (89% valid) . When we linked the mid-article teaser directly to the marriage assessment – bypassing the assessment feature at the bottom of the page – we increased traffic getting to the page by 9.3% (99.9% valid) and increased assessment completion by 5.8% (99.9% valid). What we can learn a few things from this experiment:
- Adding a mid-article teaser for an offer can increase conversion through the entire acquisition funnel.
- The articles strengthen and reinforce the value proposition for the marriage assessment. Because the teasers are mid-article, the marriage article content supports the need for people to take the assessments. This increase motivation of the reader to want to take the assessment and complete it.
- Linking people from the teaser to the assessment feature at the bottom of the article created an additional step and friction in the conversion process. It is not needed to drive more traffic to the assessment and increase completion of them.