TLDR Blog Post Experiment

A Oneupweb marketing micro-experiment.

In an age where blog posts on average are well beyond the 2000-word count, yet we have a steadily decreasing attention span on par with a goldfish, we had a question: If we can deliver the “goods” faster on one of our most trafficked blogs, will this result in more conversions of a downloaded content piece?

To answer, we created a “Too Long, Didn’t Read” (TLDR) snippet on one of our most popular articles – Intro to Sitemapping 101. The TLDR snippet gave the highlights of the article right at the top of the page, and a clear and accessible link to download the template for those who just wanted to skip the words and get right to the template.

We hypothesized that if we could make it easier for a time-stressed marketer to get what they came for, then the result would be more conversions (i.e. downloads) during the same period. And although we understand and support the need for an article like this to be long-form (we depend on organic search for article discovery), the value for the reader is in the sitemap download to ultimately create their own sitemap.

We use Google Optimize to run the test and let the program do its thing for 90 days, and as expected, but always great to be validated, the TLDR blog post exceeds the original version in both conversions (19 vs. 5) and overall conversion rate (2.66 vs. 0.84%). Not too bad.

With this quick test, it makes it clear the best blog post format for long-form content with downloads should include TLDR snippets to the beginning. Time to get to work.