The Heritage Foundation

How a membership ask to new visitors to The Daily Signal increased donor conversion rate

Experiment ID: #12512

The Heritage Foundation

Founded in 1973, The Heritage Foundation is a research and educational institution—a think tank—whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 05/22/2019 - 06/01/2019

Recently, we found that displaying the “core ask” for supporting The Daily Signal to “returning” visitors to the donation microsite increased results over a traditional membership ask. In phase 2 of this experiment, we decided to further experiment with a “membership ask” vs. a “core ask” to support The Daily Signal to “new” and “returning” visitors.

Research Question

Will showing a “membership ask” to “new visitors”  to The Daily Signal increase donor conversion rate over a “core ask” for The Daily Signal?

Design

C: TDS Core Ask (Control)
T1: THF Membership Ask (Treatment)

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: TDS Core Ask (Control) 0.01%
T1: THF Membership Ask (Treatment) 0.02%305.4% 95.5%

This experiment has a required sample size of 41,329 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 81,249, 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
× 305.4% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

With 95.4% level of confidence, we found that the “membership ask” for “new visitors” increased donor conversion rate by +305.4%.

The other metrics impacted were:

  • Dear Reader ad clickthrough rate: +83.7% (level of confidence: 100%)
  • Revenue: +929.7% (level of confidence: 99.6%)

These findings further validate the hypothesis that serving a membership ad to new visitors to The Daily Signal will not only be most effective at driving “Dear Reader” ad clicks, but will also substantially increase donor conversion and revenue gained from visitors arriving at the donation microsite.

The other half of this experiment is still running, but will help determine whether or not promoting The Daily Signal “core ask” to “returning visitors” is the most effective at generating donors and revenue from the ads.


Experiment Documented by Greg Colunga
Greg Colunga is Executive Vice President at NextAfter.

Question about experiment #12512

If you have any questions about this experiment or would like additional details not discussed above, please feel free to contact them directly.