# Guide choice plus one extra form field: significant drop in leads

- Outcome: Lost
- Page type: Lead form (Lead-gen)
- Elements: Incentive, Form fields
- Date shared: 2013
- Test run by: [MarketingSherpa](https://liftarchive.com/practitioners/marketingsherpa/)
- Commentary by: LiftArchive (our analysis, not theirs)
- Original source: https://marketingexperiments.com/a-b-testing/incentive-testing
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/marketingsherpa-act-on-incentive-choice-extra-field/

Offering a choice of three free guides while adding one more required form field significantly lowered form conversions. MarketingSherpa ran the test with Act-On around Lead Gen Summit 2013, and it was published on MarketingExperiments. The version lost to both the original single-guide page and the choice-only page.

## Result

**significant drop in leads**

- Form conversions dropped significantly compared with the original page. This is a loss.
- It also lost significantly to the choice-only version, which had kept four fields.
- Exact rates and sample sizes were not shared.

## Control

A landing page offered one free Lead Generation Quick Guide for four required form fields.

## Variant

Visitors could choose one of three Quick Guide topics, but the form asked for five required fields instead of four.

## Why it likely lost (our reading)

- The extra field added effort, and the choice of topic did not add enough perceived value to make up for it.
- The choice-only version was flat, so the choice brought little extra pull, leaving the extra field as the main difference.
- Most visitors picked the default guide, which suggests the choice was not something they valued much.

## Caveats

No exact conversion rates, sample sizes or confidence levels were shared. The test is from 2013 and ran on email traffic from MarketingSherpa and Act-On lists.

## How to run this test

- Hypothesis: If we offer a choice of free resources, then visitors will accept one more required field because the choice raises the value of what they get.
- Primary metric: Form conversion rate
- Guardrail: Lead quality from the extra field
- Guardrail: Form abandonment rate
- Who should test it: B2B SaaS and lead-gen teams that want more data per lead and are weighing what they can ask for. If you have no evidence your offer is unusually valuable, assume each extra required field costs leads.

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Credit: MarketingSherpa ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/marketingsherpa-act-on-incentive-choice-extra-field/).
Usage: Free to use, quote and build on, with credit and a link: name the practitioner or organization that ran the test and link to its LiftArchive page. The results belong to the practitioners who ran and shared them; the summaries and commentary are LiftArchive's.