How much does an email weigh?

60 Percent more than a captcha apparently.

When we officially launched Webiva last month I decided that in lieu of the standard CMS demo where you log in to a system where lots of other random Web visitors had left there dirty imprint we wanted to give users their own private Webiva backend and let them select from some premade site-templates to play around with.

To this end I threw together a site demo module over an afternoon that simply restored a backed-up site to an available demoXX.webiva.org domain, added a user to that site and then sent the user an email with login instructions. Because restoring a backup could take a little while and had to be done in the background, asking a user for their email was the easiest way to handle this process from a lazy-programmer perspective.

I added a disclaimer "your email will only be used to send you a demo, and will not yadadada..." and put the demo launcher live.

Taking a look at the logs after a couple of weeks, I noticed a lot of bounces - people visiting the site but just leaving without launching a demo. From a quick calculation it looked like 80% of visitors were leaving without launching a demo.

The obvious explanation for this was that people just didn't want to give up their email address for something as trivial as a 20-minute demo. It was just too valuable. When I put the launcher up I knew some people would feel this way, but given that Webiva is open-source I figured people would be more willing to trust that we aren't going to abuse their emails than if we were, say, a mortgage company. That apparently wasn't the case.

So the beginning of this week I tasked myself with re-writing the launcher to replace the launcher to require a captcha instead of an email. Now, from a user perspective a captcha is actually more work than entering their email - they already know their email but have to decipher the captcha - but I figured that it would lower the bounce rate some.

The results surprised me though - 80% of unique sessions skipping launch dropped to 20% - a 60% swing, and a little deeper look at the logs seem to indicate that most of the remaining 20% are just bots/etc we're not filtering out. Users were more than happy to put in a couple of seconds of work on the (admittedly not that difficult) captcha.

I always knew email address were heavy but had no idea how much they weighed down a form. Now (for a small sample size) I know - and won't make that mistake again.