Before you start: what do you know about SEO split-testing? If you’re unfamiliar with the principles of statistical SEO split-testing and how SplitSignal works, we’re suggesting you start here or request a demo of SplitSignal.
First, we asked our Twitter followers to vote:
71% of our followers guessed it right! The result was positive.
Read the full case study to find out why.
The Case Study
SplitSignal partnered with a software supply chain appsec provider who helps to automate and secure the building of and deployment of open source. SplitSignal set out to better understand how text banner ads may be impacting organic traffic to resource centre articles.
The Hypothesis
Much like how fans of streaming platforms will often pay more to watch or listen without ads, users across the web suffer from ad fatigue. With the average person seeing as many as 10,000 ads per day it’s reasonable to assume that people prefer their content ad-free, even if those ads are relevant to them. In this case, we predicted that removing the text ads on these pages would help to improve traffic. If users prefer pages without ads, maybe Google does too!
The Test
The test for this experiment consisted of removing text banner ads from a total of 27 URLs and comparing them against a control group of 36 URLs. For page and traffic recommendations, for tests, visit here.
The cohort of pages had nearly 750K clicks making the clicks a large enough data set that we could feel comfortable about the data. By simply identifying a CSS selector where the text ads sat and setting the tool to “remove” that section, we were able to create a version of the pages that did not have the text ad.
The Results
After 21 days of the test being live we saw a 2.2% increase in clicks to the test group pages. This amounted to an additional 1,399 clicks over the 21 days. Annualized that would be as much as 24,315 clicks that could be added to this site’s traffic if they did not have these text ads. Looking at that traffic number the marketing team could make an educated decision around whether or not the conversions they got from the ads or conversions they’d get from 24K extra clicks would help them achieve their overall goal of platform usage.