Research:Newcomer Experience Pilot Project- Thank You Pages and Thank You Banners
Project undertaken as an experiment, as a collaboration by the Growth and Fundraising teams at the Wikimedia Foundation. During this project, we leveraged existing fundraising activities to ask readers and donors to create accounts.
Hypothesis: if we encourage donors and readers to create accounts, they will try editing and contribute in a constructive way.
Thank you Page
editObjective: Donors in Latin America, India, and South Africa learn that they can contribute to Wikipedia, are prompted to begin contributing and to create an account to have access to the newcomer experience.
Hypothesis: If we encourage donors to create accounts (and encounter the Growth features) immediately after donating on the Thank You page, they will try editing, and will contribute in a constructive way.
Goals:
- 5% of donations that see the TY Page with a primary CTA create accounts
- 22% of the accounts created make a first un-reverted edit (i.e. “constructive activation”)
Action: Add a primary Try editing Wikipedia invitation link (CTA) onto the Thank you page (donation confirmation page) inviting donors to create an account.
Results Slide 12
- Around 7% of donors in these markets show interest in editing immediately after donating, based on the estimated click-through rate from the Thank you page.
- 45.1% of users who reached the landing page created an account. This is a low bounce rate compared to what we’ve seen from other channels. Nearly half of donors who clicked Create an account on the TY Page stayed on the registration page and successfully created their account.
- Those who create an account right after donating are less likely to start editing than organic registrations. Only 4.6% of accounts created started editing within 24 hours of creating their account. This is much lower than the organic activation rate which is estimated to be between 26-36% on these wikis.
- The “Try editing Wikipedia” CTA has a lower completion rate than the donor survey currently on our Thank you page.
- Although we came in below our target metrics of 5% account creation rate and 22% activation rate, adding this invitation onto the fundraising thank you page is a low-cost way to bring in new editors, with minimal risk.
Thank you Banner
editObjective: Wikipedia readers in our target markets learn that they can contribute to Wikipedia, are prompted to begin contributing and to create an account to have access to the newcomer experience.
Hypothesis: If we encourage readers to create accounts through banners, they will try editing and contribute in a constructive way.
Goals:
- 0.01% of impressions create accounts.
- 10% of accounts make a first un-reverted edit (i.e. “constructive activation”).
- Revert rate of edits is under 30%.
Action: Run banners that invite anonymous readers on Wikipedia to create an account and edit (example) after the fundraising campaign concludes
Results Slide 21
- 0.207% of impressions clicked on the link inviting them to Create an account and edit. Click-through rate increased when the text was changed to Learn to edit Wikipedia or Try editing Wikipedia.
- After clicking on the banner, 3.7% of landing page users created accounts. 96% of users bounced away from the Create Account page. The high bounce rate suggests that readers expected something besides an account creation form, or may even have clicked the banner and reached the page accidentally.
- After creating an account, 16.8% of accounts constructively activated. This is only slightly lower than the organic activation rate, which is estimated to be between 26-36% on these wikis, and higher than what we had estimated.
- We met 2 out of 3 goals: our activation rate was 16.8% compared to our goal of 10%, and the revert rate of edits was under 30%. We did not meet our top-bottom goal of 0.01% of impressions creating an account–we had 0.006% of impressions creating an account.
- We showed over 50 million banner impressions that resulted in 492 activated editors. The cost of this method of acquisition may not warrant further exploration at this time.
Combined findings and next steps
edit- Donors who see the Thank you page are much more likely to click on an editing invitation than readers who see a banner on Wikipedia.
- Readers who reached the Create account page from a banner are much more likely to bounce away than donors who reached it from the Thank you page.
- Readers who created an account from a banner are much more likely to edit within 24 hours than donors who created an account from the Thank you page.
- Next steps: We will continue working with the Thank you page invitation and explore adding it to new markets (learn more about subsequent donor Thank you page experiments). Inviting donors to create accounts through the Thank you page is a more sustainable and low-impact way to grow the number of new editors on Wikipedia. We will not pursue any more work on Thank you banners with editing invitations at this time.