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Content Usability testing

A/B tests on user group signup adverts

To recruit people to our user group we ran a display advert on the website. I created an A/B test using 4 different adverts. One of them was a runaway winner.

To recruit people to our user group we ran a display advert on the website. I created an A/B test using 4 different adverts. One of them was a runaway winner.

The aim of the advert was to encourage people who use the website to signup and become part of the user group. I tested the baseline against 3 variants on other popular pages throughout the website. The baseline advert ran all the time on the homepage but the homepage is not our most visited page, with just 3% of total site visits, compared to our jobs page at 11%.  So the A/B testing ran on the A-Z, contacts, forms and jobs pages as well as several other popular content areas of the site.

Here are the contenders:

Baseline
Baseline
Variety 1
Variety 1
Variety 2
Variety 2
Variety 3
Variety 3

Baseline [blue] The baseline advert was a text box with simple content and a clear call to action.

Variety 1 [yellow] The first variety of the advert was a graphic, showing the website homepage and touting the user group. Wording in the advert hit on the senses (take part, view, hear) and the text was centralised.

Variety 2 [orange] The second variety was similar to the first with the same wording but used a photo of a test tube. The wording was left-justified.

Variety 3 [green] The third variety was text-based, carefully-designed to appear like a badly-written personals ad clipped from a newspaper.

After running the test for a few days I removed one of the poor-performing varieties. After 9 days, I removed the remaining poor-performing advert and ran a follow-up test with the baseline advert and the likely winner. The total test took 12 days.

A/B testing - round 1

The results were conclusive, almost from the start of the test. The personals ad outperformed the other adverts with a conversion rate of 1.33%. According to Google Website Optimizer, this winning advert had a 99.9% chance of outperforming all the others. The baseline was the closest contender with a 0.48% conversion rate.

This is another test that shows how plain text beats graphic content and how users are often blind to snazzy, photographic advertising. On this occasion, both text-based adverts outperformed the photographic adverts. One could still argue that the winning advert is a graphic. But it only depicts words and characters, with a dirty grey background.

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