How reducing the number of calls to action affects sharing
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: 11/25/2015 - 12/02/2015
As part of their Thanksgiving stewardship campaign, Alliance Defending Freedom wanted to find a way to increase the sharing of the Thanksgiving video. By default, the landing page incorporated sharing features on every landing page. This makes it easy to share the content but there isn’t specific language asking for the share as a call-to-action.
We wanted to see what impact specifically asking visitors to share the message would have. Additionally, we wanted to see whether giving multiple sharing options would increase their likelihood to share or if it is better to focus on just a single social network.
Research Question
Which presentation of the social sharing buttons will prompt the greatest amount of sharing?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Click Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | No Sharing CTA | 0.61% | ||
| T1: | Single Share Button | 2.2% | 266.3% | 96.2% |
| T2: | Multiple Share Buttons | 0.78% | 27.3% | 25.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 502 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 1,446, 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:
266.3% increase in traffic
× 0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
This experiment produced two interesting learnings:
- We discovered that simplifying the call-to-actions so that we were only asking for one action, Share to Facebook, we were able to increase the number of total shares by 230%. This is a principle that has proven out in multiple experiments. When we give visitors multiple options, they are more likely to choose none of them.
- The other major takeaway was that just asking for a social share wasn’t enough to motivate the action. There was no statistically significant difference between the control and the multiple sharing options with copy advocating for the social share.