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Will shrinking the hero section of a homepage and adding in a countdown calendar for a popular show increase the overall click through rate for a streaming service? Find out in this episode of The Cro Show.

Watch this episode of The Cro Show, a game show for conversion rate optimization and marketing experimentation fans, and see if you can guess which test variation performed better during a recent Cro Metrics client experiment.

Full Transcript:

Jennifer Lindsay: All right, so I’ve got a client who streams original content, lots of different movies, just tons and tons of content.

And what we decided to do is spin up an experiment for their landing page.

So our target, we had a bunch of ad campaigns that were being run that were focused on, you guessed it, *popular show*, so most of our traffic, our click through from those *popular show* ads.

So we decided, hey y’all, let’s shrink up that hero section, put a countdown calendar.

Not only does it countdown until when the first episode airs, so the series premiere, but every Monday, our engineers who are so brilliant set it up so the calendar automatically refreshes and announces the first or second episode, third episode, and it keeps going.

This is super important because when we’re building experiments for our clients, we want to make sure that they can just kind of take the code and pop it and they don’t have to do a ton of extra work.

So they really appreciated this.

However, the big thing is, is that it win or not, right?

So you can see here that we’ve got this nice, large hero section.

People can click on this, watch some videos, watch some previews.

By moving this hero section and making it a little bit smaller, we’re adding possibly some distractions.

So sort of curious to see what people think if you folks have any questions.

Cara Binsfield: Yeah, I think this is a really interesting test, Jennifer, because in part, I’ve seen a lot of success with parity between ads and landing page.

So I think like that personalization makes a lot of sense.

But also, I’ve seen a lot of times where videos in the hero space create a negative impact because they can create longer page load times and things like that.

So I feel like there are two potential things that could have caused this to skew really positive.

Drew Seman: And so is – go ahead.

Katie Green: No, I was just going to say what was the split between mobile and desktop in terms of traffic?

Jennifer Lindsay: I would say about 70/30, mostly mobile.

Drew Seman: And so is the traffic from this coming specifically from *popular show* creative only or was anybody – exactly – was anybody getting this that didn’t end up at *popular show* creative? Ok.

Jennifer Lindsay: Nope, all from *popular show* creative.

Drew Seman: Okay.

Jennifer Lindsay: Let’s get some votes in!

Y’all are smart.

Okay.

I tried to remain neutral but you guys are the results of this experiment were absolutely through the roof.

Not only did we see a 60% increase in CTA clicks, but we saw a 45% lift in subscriptions.

This got bigger the longer the test ran, we are currently at 65%.

Drew Seman: And is that because it is it closer to the premiere date?

Jennifer Lindsay: Now, the premiere is now over.

Now, we’re about halfway through the season, so people are excited to get it.

And it probably was at like a 15% when we first started the test.

Then it was like 20, 25…bam premiere it was like 30%.

And now that we’ve got all these episodes out, people are just like, okay, yeah, you got me. That’s fine, I want to watch *popular show*.

This is the best show in the world.

Katie Green: And was it – I’m assuming it was consistent between mobile and desktop.

Jennifer Lindsay: Yeah.

Katie Green: There’s not like, mobile was like 200% desktop was 10% or something.

Jennifer Lindsay: Yeah, it was, it was nice – it was a very nice consistent lift across the board.

Yeah, great question.

Katie Green: Thank you for watching and be sure to subscribe to have more ideas sent directly to your inbox.