PSA: this caused a ~30% decrease in impressions
Tldr: if you’re using a personal website in your social media bios instead of a Linktree link, it’s worth testing alternatives to see if it’s hurting your OF impressions.
The full story: Working in the OF space means doing a lot of research on what other girlies are doing, right? Well, at one point a few months ago, I noticed that a lot of girls weren’t using Linktree links in their bios. Instead, they’d have a personal website in their bio, something like “their-username.com” or “their-name.com”. I didn’t think that much of it.
At most, I thought this was cute branding, good for username awareness, and I assumed it was also a clever way to link your OF on Instagram or TikTok without the platform associating it with sex work, like they might with Linktree.
I sat there thinking, how cute, that’s fun! and wanted to try this as well. And because I’m intro obsessively tracking everything, I learned that switching out all Linktree links with a personal website link drastically hurt impressions to the OF page. Drastically. There was a nearly 30% decrease in click through rate to the OF profile!!!
I ran a test that measured two different things:
Out of all of the people who click on Linktree, what % of them then click the OF button?
Out of all of the people who click on the personal website, what % of them click the OF button?
To make sure my data was statistically sound, for data point #1 above I calculated the click through rate from nearly Linktree 300,000 clicks. For that duration, Linktree had a click through rate to the OF page of 54%. I was curious to see how the personal website would compare - I assumed it would be similar, or possibly even better than Linktree.
The first day the Linktree links were switched out with the personal website, the click through rate was nowhere near 54%. It was somewhere in the 20% range. Being the patient girlie pop that I am, I thought, oh it’s only been one day, let’s see what happens. Two days later, it was still quite bad. A week later, same thing. Weeks later, same thing.
That decrease in click through rate had a huge impact on the business overall: When click through rate decreased, that directly caused the number of OF impressions to decrease. When OF impressions decrease, revenue from new subscribers decreased. It was bad, bad news.
Because of the drastic decrease in revenue, I had to stop the test. Collecting more data was not improving the situation at all. Sometimes the analytics gods bless me with a win. This time, they humbled me.The results:
Linktree’s click average through rate across 300k clicks was 54%.
The personal website’s click through rate for weeks was 27%.
THAT IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE.
Are you puzzled? Because I was puzzled. And yes, I doublechecked - nothing else was different during this testing time: the OF profile page’s conversion rate stayed approx the same, the price was the same, the photos, bio, everything. The only variable I was testing was the link in social media bios. Wowie.
Why was there such a big difference in click through rate from Linktree vs a personal website?
I’ll be honest - I have no idea why the link made such a big difference in click through rate. Everything logically in my mind points to a hypothesis that a personal website would perform better. It’s better branding, better design (since you can add cute photos to your personal website), potentially evokes curiosity, better username awareness - just to begin. It just makes sense why it would perform better, or at least the same.
But, perhaps Linktree is more synonymous with “this girl has an OF” and that’s what people are expecting when they click the link 🤷‍♀️ at the end of the day, I have absolutely no idea. But I DO know that I’m glad I tested this, otherwise I might be using an un optimal link for marketing.
Should you stop using your personal website link?
Not necessarily, but I do think you should test it though. Testing it means trying both link methods and measuring the performance of:
Impressions (the # of people who click Linktree or your personal website)
Clicks (the # of people who click on your OF, after clicking on Linktree or your personal website)
Click through rate (the percentage of clicks divided by impressions — this is the most important metric)
Maybe you’ll see similar results, maybe you won’t - who knows! But with the ~30% difference that I saw, I’ll say it’s definitely worth testing.