Do star ratings on article offers lift offer clicks?
Our articles listed app and service offers with no sign of how others rated them. We tested adding star ratings to each offer. Over 17 days, the offer click rate fell 70.4%, from 62% of readers to 18%.
Lost Responsive 17 days Called at 90%
The hypothesis
By adding star ratings to the offers in our articles, we will give readers more confidence, resulting in more clicks on the offers.
Readers came to our articles to compare apps and services, then clicked through to an offer. Nothing on the page showed how other users rated each offer. Star ratings are a common way to show this, so we pulled a rating for each offer from its most popular review source.
What we changed
Star ratings added to each offer in the article
Var A added a star rating to each offer, pulled from the most popular review source for that offer. The article copy and the offers themselves did not change.
- Star rating added to each offer
- Ratings from each offer's review source
The result
Offer clicks fell 70.4% with star ratings added
Over 17 days, the share of readers who clicked an offer fell from 62% to 18%, a 70.4% drop that cleared our confidence bar. Revenue per visitor was about 7% lower. Readers who did click with ratings in place were more likely to convert, which kept the revenue loss small. Traffic between the 2 versions was uneven.
What we took from it
Users clicked more offers without the star ratings
The ratings seem to have made readers more selective. Fewer clicked, but those who did were more ready to sign up. Since this page depends on offer clicks, the original page without ratings worked better.
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