Removing the publication date on the blog page

Paul Olyslager
Blog post
January 2012
-14%
bounce rate
 AB TestControl and variation

-14%

A
B

Paul Olyslager is a UX designer from Belgium with a focus on data driven design. He wanted to test the impact of removing the publication date of his blog post – since he had also some older post on his blog.

Hypothesis

  Removing the publication date will reduce the bounce rate of the article as visitors might think the content is no longer relevant.

Results

The variation beat the control:
The bounce rate dropped +14% (12% absolute) from 84 % to 72%.<

Learnings

Some visitors may think that content is less to be trusted when there is no publication date. In fact Paul received an email from a visitor about that. On the other hand the content may seem less relevant. The latter effect proved larger for Paul.
There is also the impact on search listing. If an date appears in the SERP it might result in less visits from Google.


Test details

Test element Copy
Page type Blog post
Test date January 2012
Tested by Paul Olyslager

Website information

Company Paul Olyslager
Website www.paulolyslager.com
Market Media
Language English
Test result
Test element Copy
Page Blog post
Result -14% bounce rate
Source: www.paulolyslager.com

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