# Personalized homepage recommendations: +136% clicks to product pages

- Outcome: Won
- Page type: Homepage (Ecommerce)
- Elements: Upsells & cross-sells, Product cards & quick add
- Test run by: [Optimizely](https://liftarchive.com/practitioners/optimizely/)
- Commentary by: LiftArchive (our analysis, not theirs)
- Original source: https://www.optimizely.com/field-notes/articles/experimentation-use-cases-retail-homepage
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/optimizely-retailer-personalized-homepage-recs/

Replacing static homepage product recommendations with personalized ones lifted click-through to product pages by 136%. Optimizely ran this test for an online retailer and published it as an Optimizely Field Notes use case. Only click-through was reported, not sales.

## Result

**+136% clicks to product pages**

- +136% click-through to product pages. Far more visitors moved from the homepage into products.
- No figures for add to cart, orders or revenue were shared, so the sales impact is unknown.

## Control

The homepage showed the same static product recommendations to every visitor.

## Variant

The homepage showed recommendations tailored to each visitor.

## Why it likely won (our reading)

- Products matched to a visitor's interests are more likely to earn a click.
- Static picks show the same items to everyone, so they are irrelevant to many visitors.
- Returning visitors may see items they already looked at, which makes it easy to pick up where they left off.

## Caveats

Vendor-reported and anonymized, with no sample size, duration or confidence level shared. The 136% figure measures clicks, not purchases.

## How to run this test

- Hypothesis: If we show each visitor personalized product recommendations on the homepage, then more will click into products because the items match their interests.
- Primary metric: Click-through rate to product pages
- Guardrail: Add-to-cart rate
- Guardrail: Revenue per visitor
- Guardrail: Homepage bounce rate
- Who should test it: Stores with a broad catalog and enough traffic and browsing data to personalize. Small catalogs or mostly first-time traffic will see less benefit.

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Credit: Optimizely ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/optimizely-retailer-personalized-homepage-recs/).
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.