Here are a couple of notes about ‘Hack the snippet‘ that I wanted to make sure got documented.

1. It significantly changed peoples’ predisposition to Webmaker before they arrived on the site
2. Its ‘post-interaction’ click-through-rate was equivalent to most one-click snippets

Behind these observations, something special was happening in ‘Hack the snippet’. I can’t tell you exactly what it was that had the end-effect, but it’s worth remembering the effect.

1. It ‘warmed people up’ to Webmaker

• The ‘Hack the snippet’ snippet
  • was shown to the same audience (Firefox users) as eight other snippet variations we ran during the campaign
  • had the same % of users click through to the landing page
  • had the same on-site experience on webmaker.org as all the other snippet variations we tested (the same landing page, sign-up ask etc)
• But when people who had interacted with ‘Hack the snippet’ landed on the website, they were more than three times as likely to signup for a webmaker account

Same audience, same engagement rate, same ask… but triple the conversion rate (most regular snippet traffic converted ~2%, ‘Hack the snippet’ traffic converted ~7%).

Something within that experience (and likely the overall quality of it) makes the Webmaker proposition more appealing to people who ‘hacked the snippet’. It could be one of many things: the simplicity, the guided learning, the feeling of power from editing the Firefox start page, the particular phrasing of the copy or many of the subtle design decisions. But whatever it was, it worked.

We need to keep looking for ways to recreate this.

Not everything we do going forwards needs to be a ‘Hack the snippet’ snippet (you can see how much time and effort went into that in the bug).

But when we think about these new-user experiences, we have a benchmark to compare things too. We know how much impact these things can have when all the parts align.

2. The ‘post-interaction’ CTR was as good as most one-click snippets

This is a quicker note:

• Despite the steps involved in completing the ‘Hack the snippet’ on page activity, the same total number of people clicked through when compared to a standard ‘one-click’ snippet.
• We got the same % of the audience to engage with a learning activity and then click through to the webmaker site, as we usually get just giving them a link directly to Webmaker
  • This defies most “best practice” about minimizing number of clicks

Again, this doesn’t give us an immediate thing we can repeat, but it gives us a benchmark to build on.

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