Picture of a muppet character

One of the goals of the European Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications was to harden the use of cookies which now are now subject to prior consent by the user (which does not necessarily mean that the user needs to explicitl give this consent but let’s skip the legal discussion).

Now this regulation has been adopted (and started to be somehow enforced) in the different European countries so more and more cookies have a very visible notice explaining their cookie policy (or even showing a pop-up window asking for permission to install cookies in your browser).

Our main concern when internally discussing how to best comply with the law was whether any kind of legal statement in a visible place of our landing page could scare some visitors away and drop our conversion rate. To know how big was the problem we decided to perform a WordPress A/B testing experiment where one version included our cookie policy notice in the middle of the landing page while the other didn’t (the cookie policy only appeared in the footer).

To my surprise (not the first time!), the results of the A/B test were conclusive: complying with the Cookie Law does not affect your conversion rate! (strictly speaking, the version without a visible notice had a 5% better conversion rate but the difference was not statistically significant

So, yes, you may not enjoy “polluting” your landing page with legal notices but at least this one looks harmless. I guess people are too used to all kinds of distractions so one more does not really affect their behaviour.

Featured image taken from Surian Soosay

2 responses to “Hate to implement the EU Cookie Law? At least it’s not killing your conversions”

  1. John Avatar

    What was your sample size? And how long did you run the test for? I’m glad at least someone has studied this. Thanks

    1. David Aguilera Avatar

      Hi John,

      I’m afraid we no longer have the data about that particular experiment. It’s been a while since then and we’ve been removing old stats. But I’d say the sample size wasn’t very big; we run the test in our website when it didn’t have much visitors…

      Regards,
      David

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