Safelist Experiment Results: What the Data Showed

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In my last post, I explained the idea behind a small safelist experiment I decided to run.

Instead of promoting an offer or trying to build my list, I asked visitors to do something very simple.

Click a button.

There was no reward for clicking it.
No redirect.
No opt-in form.

Just a simple invitation to participate in the experiment.

The goal was to see how many visitors arriving from safelists would actually interact with the page.

Now that the experiment is finished, we can look at the numbers.

Overall Experiment Results

Over the course of about a week, I promoted the splash page on 40 different safelists.

Here are the totals.

Metric	Result
Safelists Tested	40
Total Visits	4,047
Participation Clicks	357
Overall Participation Rate	8.82%

Considering there was no incentive to click the button, I thought this was pretty interesting.

The button was clicked 357 times during the experiment.

Since I didn’t track IP addresses, that number represents total clicks rather than unique participants.

Visitors were allowed to click the button once per safelist per day, so some people may have participated more than once if they saw the experiment on multiple sites.

Top Safelist Traffic Sources

First, let’s look at which safelists delivered the most visitors.

Safelist	Visits	Clicks	CTR %
My Daily Mailer	471	134	28.45
Mister Safelist	304	30	9.87
I Love Traffic	280	28	10.00
State of the Art Mailer	226	10	4.42
List Impact	205	12	5.85
European Safelist	202	11	5.45
List Avail	172	11	6.40
Website Traffic Rewards	152	5	3.29
List Mailer Plus	146	6	4.11
Instant Ad Power	139	11	7.91

This shows which safelists produced the most traffic during the test.

But traffic volume is only part of the story.

Top Engagement Rates

The more interesting metric is participation rate — the percentage of visitors who actually clicked the button.

Here are some of the highest engagement rates from the experiment.

Safelist	CTR %	Visits
My Daily Mailer	28.45%	471
I Love Traffic	10.00%	280
Mister Safelist	9.87%	304
Instant Ad Power	7.91%	139
List Avail	6.40%	172
List Impact	5.85%	205
European Safelist	5.45%	202
State of the Art Mailer	4.42%	226

Most safelists landed somewhere between 4% and 7% participation.

That seems to be a fairly typical range for this type of interaction.

Safelists Producing the Most Participation

Another way to look at the results is by total participation clicks.

These are the safelists that generated the most actual interaction with the experiment page.

Safelist	Clicks
My Daily Mailer	134
Mister Safelist	30
I Love Traffic	28
List Impact	12
European Safelist	11
List Avail	11
Instant Ad Power	11
State of the Art Mailer	10

Just the top three safelists generated more than half of all participation clicks in the experiment.

The Big Outlier

One result stood out immediately when I started looking through the numbers.

My Daily Mailer

Visits	Clicks	CTR
471	134	28.45%

That participation rate was dramatically higher than anything else in the experiment.

There are probably a few reasons for this.

First, My Daily Mailer has a very active community.

Second, the platform includes “Lucky Letters” — messages that look like normal ads but sometimes contain prizes. That tends to encourage members to actually look at the pages they land on instead of just clicking through them.

And finally, it’s possible my ad simply stood out more on that platform since my picture appears on the page and members are already familiar with me there.

Whatever the reason, the difference was significant.

What the Data Suggests

One thing this experiment reinforces is something I’ve believed for a long time.

Safelists are not all the same.

Some communities are more active than others.

And the design of the platform itself can influence how members interact with ads.

Same splash page.
Same message.
Same time period.

Yet the engagement levels varied dramatically depending on the safelist.

That’s part of what makes experiments like this interesting.

Final Thoughts

I originally ran this experiment because I missed publishing safelist statistics like I used to.

It turned out to be a fun way to look at safelist traffic from a slightly different perspective.

Instead of measuring signups or conversions, this experiment simply measured curiosity.

And based on the results, there are clearly a lot of curious safelist users out there.

Thanks again to everyone who took a moment to participate.