Initially, we had our share buttons only on the top of the posts and a few people complained that when they want to share after reading, they have to scroll up.

We asked around a little and found out that most people like to share only after they’ve gone through the entire post, which is why we added another set of buttons at the end.

For the record I am still a big fan of VMO – you can get some great tips here and even if one of them pays off it can mean a lot for your business.

The point was that there are no actionable insights that can be taken from this case study. I guess it’s a matter of target audience. In my opinion, I bet most people reading this blog are aware that there are A/B testing tools and know that the tools can measure improvements in changes. What they (and I) come to this blog to read are little tricks and tips and insights for things that we could change on our sites that we hadn’t really thought of or fully considered that could improve conversions.

Moving something from an extremely non-prominent location to a much more prominent location is an obvious part of any test, hence I learnt nothing. Hence that is my complaint.

I guess this case study still serves the purpose of teaching absolute newbies that you can use a tool like VWO to measure changes in pages. My hope is that we continue to see more case studies that target the audience group that I fall in.

Thanks for reading.

First off, I agree with George that moving it to a more prominent location will certainly increase conversions. But the power of the case study is being about to see HOW MUCH the sharing increased.

While every website is different, I can be fairly certain that if I were to change the layout of my own site’s sharing, I could estimate how much sharing would change (x36) and how much it would affect my pageviews (not at all). Having educated estimated numbers on how that could change things for my website lets me determine whether it is worthwhile for me to perform a split test like this.

How often do I make content? once a week? How frequently does my current content get shared? 15 times per new article? How many visitors does that lead to? 2 per share? Of those that come to my site through facebook or twitter shares, how many sign up for my RSS feed or email list or request a quote, 1%, 10%, 20%? How much is each quote or each email list subscriber worth to me – $1, $5, $20?

If every email subscriber was worth a dollar to me, and I was getting only 1% of my social traffic to convert, and I was only getting 15 social visitors per article, and I only write 1 article a week, then yeah, this test might not be a priority.

HOWEVER, if I knew that each signup was worth $5, and that my social traffic typically converts at 20%, and I get on average 15 shares an article, then this information is powerful.

In that case, were I to implement a similar test and receive similar results (x36), then that would mean my sharing would go from 15 shares per to 540 shares. All other things remaining constant, that would be 1080 social visitors, worth a dollar a pop (20% * $5). If that was the case, mixing this test with a more frequent content push (moving from 1 to 3 articles a week), could be HUGE for a business.

In conclusion George, this case study gives us a hypothetical number to use for our estimates. Is that number perfect? No, but it does allow us to do a little math, combine it with our own metrics and make strategic decisions based off of what we learn.

Thanks VWO.

Your point of “something from the footer to a prominent location will of course bring huge results” is not entirely valid. It could very well also have meant that people found the widget intruding and other site metrics (like engagement or pageviews) got down. Moreover, we could never know the exact magnitude of increase in sharing even if we could have guessed that it would increase sharing.