How visually boosting urgency affects conversion

Alliance Defending Freedom

Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building legal organization that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 06/19/2015 - 06/28/2015

As part of their fiscal year end campaign, Alliance Defending Freedom wanted to find a way to boost the conversion of their already high performing landing page.

The audience being driven to the landing page was already highly motivated as we discovered in a past experiment. Based upon those results, we didn’t think that adding value proposition language would boost the results so we decided to test a visual element that would increase the urgency. We created a treatment with a timer to the page that counted down to the end of the fiscal year.

Research Question

Does the addition of a countdown timer increase the urgency of the appeal enough to boost the overall conversion of the page?

Design

C: No Countdown Clock

T1: With Countdown Clock

Results

This experiment has a required sample size of 1,600 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 3,352, 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
× 12.6% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

In the early weeks of the campaign, the timer had no significant impact on the conversion rate of the page.  However, throughout the final week of the campaign, the timer added an increased sense of urgency that improved the page conversion by 12.6%.

As shown in the graph above, it wasn’t until this final week that the conversion rates diverged enough to reach a statistically significant lift.