{"id":4263,"date":"2015-02-13T10:58:37","date_gmt":"2015-02-13T16:58:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/blog\/?p=4263"},"modified":"2017-05-18T15:38:06","modified_gmt":"2017-05-18T15:38:06","slug":"website-sidebar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/?p=4263","title":{"rendered":"Ditch the Sidebar on Your Website and Increase Conversion Rates by 26%"},"content":{"rendered":"

How often do you click a website’s sidebar?<\/p>\n

I’ll tell you.<\/p>\n

0.3% of the time.<\/p>\n

In other words, for every 1,000 people who come to your website, 3 people will click on the sidebar.<\/p>\n

THREE!<\/p>\n

In case you were wondering…<\/p>\n

Yes, that is really lousy.<\/p>\n

By comparison, 200 out of every 1,000 people who came to this blog post clicked<\/a> the call to action and opted in to my email list.<\/p>\n

So, what would happen if you removed the sidebar and focused your readers’ attention solely on the\u00a0content instead?<\/p>\n

Recently Devesh<\/a> and I ran an experiment\u00a0to\u00a0find out for ourselves.<\/p>\n

What happened\u00a0when we ditched the\u00a0sidebar\u00a0on the Videofruit blog<\/h2>\n

The #1 action I want a new reader to take when they come to my site is simple…<\/p>\n

Subscribe to my email list.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The\u00a0most effective way\u00a0I’ve found to do that is by offering specific pieces of premium content in a blog post in exchange for an email address (i.e. content upgrades<\/a>).<\/p>\n

My theory going into this test was that by removing the sidebar, the readers’ attention would be more focused on the content and the opt-in rates of the content upgrades would go up.<\/p>\n

Before I share the results, let me show you what we did.<\/p>\n

A typical Videofruit blog post looks like this…<\/p>\n

\"\"

In our experiment, we used the split testing tool Optimizely to send half of this post’s readers to our traditional format that included a sidebar. The other 50% of readers went to a variation without a sidebar.<\/p>\n

This is what that page looked like…<\/p>\n

\"\"

Then we measured the results to see which page produced the most\u00a0email signups.<\/p>\n

The results?<\/p>\n

The version\u00a0with no sidebar produced 26% more email signups<\/strong> than the version with a sidebar.<\/p>\n

Here’s a look at the split testing data…<\/p>\n

\"\"

Does this mean I just rip the sidebar off my website?<\/h2>\n

Maybe.<\/p>\n

For this test to be statistically relevant, we needed a 95% confidence rate, and we\u00a0fell 1% short.\u00a0We should also have at least 100 – 200 conversions per variation.<\/p>\n

This is mainly due to needing more traffic to the post.<\/p>\n

So, we are running a site-wide test over the next month before\u00a0permanently removing the sidebar.<\/p>\n

We’ll report back the results when it concludes.<\/p>\n

Also, if the experiment goes as expected, we’ll lay out the step-by-step process\u00a0you can follow to properly test and implement this strategy<\/p>\n

PS: Have you ever changed up one element on your blog and seen major results?\u00a0I would love to learn from you. Share in the comment section below.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How often do you click a website’s sidebar? I’ll tell you. 0.3% of the time. In other words, for every…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}