"Please Rate Your Experience": The Effect of Calls to Action on Website User Conversion
(A2019-7766)

AUTHORS

Dikla Perez, Bar Ilan University; Lior Zalmanson, Hifa University ; Gal Oestreicher - Singer, Tel-Aviv University

KEYWORDS

Freemium; question-behavior; Conversion-Rate

ABSTRACT

Website owners find it challenging to elicit payment from their users and convert them from free to fee-paying consumers. Specifically, we study possible avenues to increase a website’s conversion rate. We study the causal effect of ‘calls to action’—prompts that require the user to rate the service— on users' monetary conversion. We first present a controlled web experiment to establish a causal relationship between users’ exposure to prompts and their subsequent monetary contributions. Next, in two large-scale field studies, we establish the applicability of our findings to real-life settings. Our research is novel in showing a causal relation between calls to action and user conversion, both in the lab and in the field. Moreover, we show that our results are robust to context (content website and web service websites) and business model (Freemium and donation-based).