How a direct ask on a blog impacts long-term donor 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: 03/21/2017 - 05/16/2017
For Alliance Defending Freedom, the mobile version of their blog received a significant volume of traffic from Facebook. Historically, we had used this as an opportunity to acquire new email addresses to the file. We decided to test whether this audience could also have the potential to be a good donor acquisition source. To do this, we replaced the standard email acquisition offer with a direct ask for one of their clients, Barronelle.
Research Question
Can a direct donation ask on the blog have a significant impact on donor conversion?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Inline Email Ask | 0.06% | ||
| T1: | Barronelle Direct Ask | 0.11% | 81.4% | 97.7% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 26,226 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 70,911, 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
× 81.4% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
We found that the visitors that saw the direct ask ad, were 81% more likely to make a gift than those that did not. At the same time, removing the email offer, reduced the email acquisition by 98%. This reinforced our expected outcome and gives us the knowledge that there are multiple levers we can pull depending upon our desired outcome.
Upon further analysis, we found that the majority of visitors did not make their gift immediately when they saw the direct ask ad. Instead, they came back to that donation page when prompted on a different channel and made their gift at a later date. This would indicate that the blog may be better used reinforcing the need rather than making a direct ask.