How a inbound widget affects conversion against a donate button
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
Ended On: 03/31/2020
CaringBridge had used their tribute widget throughout the site as a fundraising mechanism. They had tested this widget on their “tributes” pages, where people leave supportive messages to their friends and loved ones, and found that it increased revenue. However, due to a technical setup issue, the mobile version had a different experience. CaringBridge decided to re-test this to determine if the same results held for the mobile experience.
Research Question
How will an inbound widget affect conversion against a donate button?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Donate Button | 0.09% | ||
| T1: | Tribute Widget | 0.12% | 26.2% | 99.8% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 137,521 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 660,071, 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
× 26.2% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
On mobile devices, the tribute widget increased conversion 26.2% — which showed that the same “inbound” technique of getting the user to start their donation with a message to a friend was highly effective on mobile devices, where conversion is reduced anyways. This highlights a tactic that could be effective on mobile donation pages, which typically convert much lower than desktop donation pages.