Letting visitors pick 1 of 3 free guides: no change in conversions
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsLetting visitors choose one of three free Quick Guide topics, instead of offering a single guide, made no statistical difference to form conversions.
MarketingSherpa ran the test with Act-On around Lead Gen Summit 2013, and it was published on MarketingExperiments.
Most visitors in both versions picked the default lead generation guide anyway.
- Form conversions showed no statistical difference between the single guide and the choice of three. Treat this as flat.
- The default Lead Generation guide was the most popular pick in both versions.
- Exact conversion rates and sample sizes were not shared.
The change
Variant adds tabs to choose one of three guide topics
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
A landing page reached from a promo email offered one free Lead Generation Quick Guide in exchange for four required form fields.
Variant
The same page let visitors pick one of three Quick Guide topics, shown as tabs. The form still had four required fields.
Why it likely came out this way
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- The audience came from a lead-gen focused email and event, so the default topic already matched what most of them wanted.
- The tabs may have been easy to miss, so many visitors never noticed they had a choice.
- The team also wondered whether the tabs added friction, which could cancel out any gain from extra choice.
Caveats: No conversion rates, sample sizes or confidence levels were shared. The test is from 2013 and drew on MarketingSherpa and Act-On email lists.
Who ran it
MarketingSherpa ran this test and published the results (MarketingExperiments). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on MarketingSherpa →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we let visitors choose which free resource they get, then more of them will fill in the form because they can pick the one most relevant to them.
- Primary metric
- Form conversion rate
- Guardrails
- Share of visitors who change the default choice
- Lead quality by chosen topic
- Who should test it
- Lead-gen businesses and B2B SaaS teams with a broad audience and several content offers. If your traffic comes from a campaign about one topic, a choice probably won't help.
Questions
Does offering a choice of lead magnets increase sign-ups?
Not in this test: conversions were flat and most people kept the default.
A choice may help more when the audience is mixed and the options are clearly visible.
Can more choice hurt a lead form?
It can add a decision and some friction.
In a related version of this test, adding an extra form field on top of the choice lowered conversions significantly.