How inline acquisition offers in place of ads affected clickthrough
Focus on the Family
Focus on the Family is a global Christian ministry dedicated to helping families thrive. We provide help and resources for couples to build healthy marriages that reflect God's design, and for parents to raise their children according to morals and values grounded in biblical principles.
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 10/30/2017 - 11/09/2017
Focus on the Family currently uses DoubleClick for Publishers to manage ad fill throughout their website. Most of the ads in rotation are for their own resources, giving opportunities, and some third-party offers. One such placement is a mid-roll banner targeting long-form article pages. They hypothesized that an inline email acquisition offer that is contextually relevant for their audience may increase clickthrough and help capture more of the high volume of new visitors viewing these articles.
They already had a free online Marriage Assessment which has resonated well with visitors to their marriage and parenting content, so they split the traffic to articles in those categories and delivered an inline offer for the assessment in place of the mid-roll ad from DoubleClick to half the audience.
Research Question
Will replacing the mid-roll advertising banner with an inline acquisition increase clicks for this placement?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Click Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Mid-roll Ad Banner Rotation | 0.10% | ||
| T1: | Inline Acquisition Offer | 2.0% | 1,870.7% | 100.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 223 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 242,062, 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:
1,870.7% increase in traffic
× 0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The inline treatment increased the number of offer clicks by over 1,870%! This learning shows how the alignment of an offer, as well as its treatment, can be put to work to acquire more names. We hypothesize that a large portion of this impact is due to “banner blindness”—a web usability phenomenon where visitors consciously or subconsciously ignore banner-like information. Banners also limit the amount of value proposition you can effectively communicate, which can decrease perceived value.
With high traffic and known content themes, we plan to test further into this placement—including moving it to the end of the content where we hypothesize we may be able to capitalize on the natural pivot/decision point created by completing the article. Other potential tests include the headline, button, and value proposition copy as well as the inclusion of supporting graphical elements.