How increasing intensity of color on a widget affects clickthrough rate
CaringBridge
CaringBridge offers free personal, protected websites for people to easily share updates and receive support and encouragement from their community during a health journey. Every 7 minutes, a CaringBridge website is created for someone experiencing a health event.
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 10/17/2017 - 10/25/2017
CaringBridge had long sought to increase clickthrough rate on their tribute widget, which started the gift process for . One of their designers hypothesized that the current tribute widget blended in too much with the rest of the site and needed some “pop”. Using the intense CaringBridge brand purple, she created a treatment designed to attract more attention, and hopefully clickthrough rate.
CaringBridge tested the new tribute widget in both desktop and mobile views and launched a test to determine a winner.
Research Question
Will increasing the intensity of the tribute widget attract more attention and increase clickthrough rate?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Click Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 0.11% | ||
| T1: | Increased intensity | 0.08% | -27.6% | 100.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 81,109 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 1,856,349, 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:
27.6% decrease in traffic
× 0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The treatment tribute widget reduced clickthrough rate by 27.6%, which further reduced donations and revenue downstream. We believe this can largely be attributed to the decrease in readability due to the white text now being placed on the intense purple. In breaking down the data by device, most of the decrease came from mobile devices, in which this effect is intensified due to the smaller screen size.
This was just the first test in a series of tribute widget tests designed to increase clickthrough rate.