Success Story

SEO Hacker Increased CTR Using A/B Testing

17% Click-through rate

About SEO Hacker

Sean Si is a motivational speaker by morning, and SEO evangelist by night. In 2010, he single-handedly launched the SEO Hacker Blog, to create a conversation around the rising importance of SEO in marketing and branding. When the website is not talking about the most recent and pivotal trends in the SEO industry, they are hosting SEO tutorials for marketers and website owners. Today, the widely read SEO Hacker is managed by Sean and a team of 20 like-minded SEO specialists.

Goals

One of the core goals of Sean’s SEO Hacker website is to engage their audience through blog posts. Sean was using emails to reach out to his readers. But soon, he realised that email was reverting to its original nature of being cluttered. He decided to give his communication strategy an extra push, complementing his current channels with VWO Engage to see what effect it had on SEO Hacker goals.

Tests run

Sean sends a push notification each time a new post is published. He also sends follow-up notifications to get more page-views on the same post.

Inspired by the ease of using VWO Engage, he experimented with a couple of things.

At first, he sent the same notification at different times on the same day, to reach out to people who missed the previous one. For such a notification, Sean managed to get a click rate of 9.8% the first time, and 6.52% the second time.

After a gap of few days, he sent the same notification again. This time he got a click rate of 8.99%.

These test cases may not work with email. However, push notifications are real time and to dismiss them, people simply have to click on the exit icon. Also, with VWO Engage, you even have the option to make a notification auto-fade after 20 seconds if users don’t click it. There is no redundancy as in the case of opening your inbox to see the same email twice or more in a short span of time.

Sean also experimented by sending the same notification, with just a few words changed, twice in a gap of 3 days. The first time he sent the notification, he added the phrase “Click Here”. While in the second notification, he didn’t add the word “Click”. The first one got a click rate of 16.53% and the other, got a click rate of 13.11%.

See the 2 notifications below:

2 variations of the same Push Notification with & without the word "Click"

Conclusion

Within 3 months of signing up with VWO Engage, SEO Hacker clocked 3069 subscribers. Sean sends an average of 6 notifications in a month. The average click rate of notifications so far is 11.71%, and the best click rate is 16.53%.

Sean uses VWO Engage to engage his audience with the content on SEO Hacker website. In his words, “I’m trying to get people to return to my site whenever I have a new post. That’s really the most important thing for me – a retained audience.”

An indirect benefit he observed was that repeat visits often led to more social shares. And when asked if he would like to recommend using website push notifications as a communication channel, he said, “Do it. Now. You’re welcome.”

According to Sean:
“The ease of using VWO Engage allows great room for experimentation- be it with content, time, or frequency of reaching out to my subscribers.“