How “activation” language affects clickthrough rate

Dallas Theological Seminary

The DTS mission is, “to glorify God by equipping godly servant-leaders for the proclamation of His Word and the building up of the body of Christ worldwide.” They strive to help men and women fulfill the Great Commission and the Great Commandment, or more simply: Teach Truth. Love Well.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 11/03/2015 - 11/27/2015

Dallas Theological Seminary was promoting a free online course taught by the president of the Seminary. They launched an ad campaign on Facebook to generate interest in the course, and saw a tremendous response. This led them to think that their prospect targets might be much more qualified and ready to sign up. So they created a second ad that used “Activate your free course now” as a call-to-action and A/B tested them to see which attracted more clicks.

Research Question

Will “activation” language in the call-to-action increase clickthrough rate?

Design

C: Learn More language

T1: Activate language

Results

This experiment has a required sample size of 530 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 1,635, 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
× 25.7% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

The ad with “activation” language produced a 25.7% increase in clickthrough rate, which resulted in a large increase in motivated traffic to the signup page. Conversion rate on the following signup page actually increased, which meant that DTS got more course enrollees for the same spend, effectively lowering their cost per email address.

This told DTS that when they are able to precisely target audiences, the prospect might be already further along in the conversion funnel.