Make Your Content Useful: How a simple UI change created 74% more page views

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When your digital media business depends largely on page views, anything you can do to increase those views also increases the chance of long-term success. For Car & Driver, one set of pages in particular drives a significant amount of revenue – the vehicle research section.

It was true in 2008, when they ran this A/B test, and it’s still true today. In fact, the discoveries from the A/B test here have been carried over through the years into today’s designs.

Here’s some background:

Car & Driver Test Background

The control widget was a simple block of creative on the homepage that linked to the various pages within the vehicle research section.

Car & Driver Test Control

The treatment widget took a different approach. In order to increase engagement with the widget, and eventually page views to the section, the treatment added an element of interactivity via a simple drop-down functionality. In short, they made the content useful to the customer.

Car & Driver Experiment Treatment

The result was a 74% increase in page views in the vehicle research section of the site.

Car & Driver Experiment Results

But what is truly interesting about this test, and illustrates the true value of testing, was that Car & Driver learned something important about their customer. Something so important, in fact, that today, eight years later, this approach is used to create an even more effective page design.

Car & Driver Current Page Design

By simply making a set of links, more useful to the customer, Car & Driver was able to not only increase engagement for the vehicle research section, but they learned a system to give themselves a long-term edge.

Below is the full, downloadable slide presentation for this test.

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