My experiment recorded 143 attention clicks.
But they didn’t come from 143 different people.
They came from 94 distinct tracked visitors.
And just 20 of those visitors generated 69 of the clicks.
Almost half.
That was the final surprise in my Safelist Attention Project.
Most People Clicked Once. A Small Group Kept Clicking.
Throughout this experiment, I used a persistent browser cookie to identify returning visitors.
That doesn’t guarantee every visitor ID represents a completely separate physical person. Someone using another browser or device could receive another ID.
But it gave me a reasonable way to distinguish between a tracked browser appearing once and one coming back later.
Out of 7,380 distinct tracked visitor IDs, only 94 ever clicked the attention button.
Of those 94:
| Clicker Type | Tracked Clickers | Attention Clicks | Share of Clicks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clicked once | 74 | 74 | 51.7% |
| Clicked on multiple visits | 20 | 69 | 48.3% |
| Total | 94 | 143 | 100% |
That’s the number that really changed how I looked at the experiment.
74 tracked visitors clicked once and generated 74 clicks.
20 repeat clickers generated 69 clicks.
Nearly the same number of clicks.
From dramatically different numbers of people.
That Small Group Was Really Small
Those 20 repeat clickers represented only 21.3% of the people who clicked at all.
Yet they generated 48.3% of every attention click I recorded.
Put against the entire experiment, the number gets even more surprising.
There were 7,380 distinct tracked visitor IDs.
Only 20 became repeat clickers.
That’s about 0.27% of all tracked visitors.
Now, I want to be careful with that number.
I’m not saying 0.27% of the audience created half the value of the campaign.
They didn’t.
This experiment measured one very specific thing: whether somebody deliberately clicked the button telling me they had noticed the page.
What the number shows is much narrower—and still interesting:
A very small group generated a surprisingly large share of the measured interaction.
Repeat Clicking Usually Meant More Than One Extra Click
At first, I wondered if “repeat clicker” mostly meant somebody saw the experiment twice and clicked both times.
That did happen.
But it wasn’t the whole story.
Of the 20 repeat clickers:
- 9 clicked twice
- 11 clicked three or more times
- several clicked four, five, or six times
- one tracked visitor clicked on eight separate visits
So more than half of the repeat-clicker group interacted at least three times.
And the result wasn’t being distorted by one extreme visitor.
The most active tracked visitor produced eight clicks.
The remaining repeat clicks were spread across a small group that kept interacting when they encountered the experiment again.
Why?
I don’t know.
Maybe they recognized the experiment.
Maybe they enjoyed participating.
Maybe the page became familiar.
Maybe they remembered the unusual image.
Maybe they simply thought, “There’s Jerry’s experiment again. I’ll click the button.”
The experiment never asked them why they clicked again, so I don’t want to invent an explanation.
The safest conclusion is simply this:
The same tracked visitors remained willing to deliberately interact on later visits.
Most Returning Visitors Still Never Clicked
There’s another number that keeps all of this in perspective.
In my previous post, How Many Times Did People See My Ad Before They Clicked?, I looked at when people first responded.
There were 288 tracked visitors who appeared more than once during the experiment.
But returning did not automatically mean engaging.
Of those 288 repeat visitors:
- 247 never clicked
- 21 clicked on exactly one visit
- 20 clicked on multiple visits
So only 6.9% of all returning visitors became repeat clickers.
That’s important.
I don’t want to look at these numbers and say:
“Just keep showing people the same ad and they’ll eventually become highly engaged.”
The data doesn’t say that.
Most returners still never clicked.
What happened instead was that a relatively small subgroup behaved very differently from everybody else.
Ten Clicks Can Tell Two Completely Different Stories
This may be the most useful lesson I’ve taken from this final part of the experiment.
Imagine two campaigns.
Campaign A gets 10 clicks from 10 different people.
Campaign B gets 10 clicks from three people who keep returning and interacting.
If you’re only looking at the click counter, both campaigns say:
10 clicks.
But those numbers are telling very different stories.
Campaign A shows more breadth.
Campaign B shows more repeat engagement.
Which would I rather have?
That depends on what I’m trying to accomplish.
If I’m looking for new leads, I’d probably be more interested in reaching more different people.
If I’m trying to build recognition or familiarity, repeat interaction may also be useful.
And if I’m trying to make sales?
Then neither number tells me enough.
I’d want actual conversion data.
That’s something this experiment has kept reminding me:
The value of a metric depends on what you’re trying to learn from it.
Different Safelists Produced Different Patterns
This also helped explain something I had noticed earlier in the project.
Not every safelist produced the same kind of attention.
Mister Safelist generated 14 attention clicks from 14 different tracked visitors.
That’s broad participation.
SendCircle produced 32 clicks from 20 tracked clickers, including five repeat clickers who generated 17 clicks between them.
My Daily Mailer showed a similar mix: 30 clicks from 19 tracked clickers, with five repeat clickers generating 16 clicks.
Then there were sources such as Zodiac Mailer, where eight clicks came from two tracked visitors who both interacted repeatedly.
I don’t look at those patterns as better or worse.
They’re different.
One source may produce broader participation.
Another may produce stronger repeat engagement from a smaller responsive group.
The important thing is that the total click number by itself doesn’t show the difference.
Why I Want Two Numbers From Now On
Before this experiment, if somebody told me an ad received 100 clicks, my first instinct would probably be to compare that number with another source that received 80 or 120.
Now I want another number sitting beside it:
How many different tracked visitors produced those clicks?
Because:
100 clicks from 100 people tells me one story.
100 clicks from 50 people tells me another.
100 clicks from 20 people tells me something else entirely.
None of those outcomes is automatically good or bad.
But without knowing both total clicks and unique clickers, I don’t really know what kind of response I’m looking at.
That’s a lesson I can use far beyond safelists.
The same idea could matter with email, content marketing, recurring advertising, social media, or anywhere else people can interact with something more than once.
One More Interesting Connection To The Eyes
There was one other result I couldn’t help noticing.
Earlier in this series, I looked at what people said made them notice the experiment page.
The eyes in the image barely won among people’s first responses.
But among the 29 additional follow-up answers submitted by repeat respondents, 21 selected the eyes.
That doesn’t prove the eyes caused repeat engagement.
It doesn’t even prove they were the reason somebody remembered the page.
But it does make me wonder whether that visual became especially recognizable once people had seen the experiment before.
Maybe the creative wasn’t only noticeable.
Maybe, for some people, it became familiar.
That’s something I’d have to test separately.
What This Doesn’t Prove
There are a few important limits to these results.
The visitor IDs were cookie-based, so they represent tracked browsers rather than guaranteed individual human identities.
A repeat click does not equal a new lead, a sale, or stronger buying intent.
The experiment didn’t ask people why they clicked again.
Visitors weren’t randomly assigned a certain number of exposures.
And this wasn’t a normal sales page.
The page openly told people they were part of an experiment and asked them to click a button if they noticed it.
Someone who returned later may simply have recognized the page and remembered what I was asking them to do.
That’s still deliberate interaction.
But I wouldn’t assume a commercial offer would produce exactly the same behavior.
What This Whole Experiment Changed For Me
When I started this project back in July, I really thought I was going to find out which safelists were best at getting attention.
I did learn quite a bit about the safelists.
But that wasn’t the most interesting part.
I learned that traffic and attention aren’t the same thing.
I learned there can be more than one kind of winner, depending on what I measure.
I learned that people notice different things.
I learned that some people don’t respond the first time they see an ad.
And now I’ve learned that even after people do respond, the attention itself isn’t necessarily spread evenly.
Some of it was broad.
Some of it came from repeat engagement.
Some visitors never responded at all.
And a very small group generated a surprisingly large share of the visible activity.
I started with a traffic question.
I ended up with a measurement lesson.
The number on the counter is only the beginning of the story.
From now on, if I see that an ad got 100 clicks, I don’t think I’m going to be satisfied with knowing there were 100 clicks.
I’m going to want to know one more thing:
Who produced them?
That’s probably the biggest lesson I’m taking away from the Safelist Attention Project.
Don’t just count the clicks. Understand who is producing them.
And with that, I’m going to call this the final core article in this experiment.
I’ve gotten far more out of that strange little page than I expected when I started sending it through safelists in July.
I’m not finished experimenting, though.
So now I’d like to turn the next one over to you.
If I run another marketing attention experiment, what would you like me to test?
Different headlines?
Different images?
Short emails versus long emails?
Curiosity versus benefits?
A plain page versus a designed page?
Whether attention actually predicts conversions?
Leave me a comment and let me know.
Your idea might become my next experiment.
Thanks for following along,
Jerry
The Safelist Attention Project
Follow the experiment from the beginning:
- I Tested 45 Safelists: Which Ones Sent Visitors Who Actually Paid Attention?
- More Traffic or More Attention? My Safelist Experiment Found They’re Not the Same
- Who Won My Safelist Experiment? I Found 4 Different Answers.
- What Made People Notice My Ad? The Eyes Barely Won.
- How Many Times Did People See My Ad Before They Clicked?
- Almost Half My Attention Clicks Came From Just 20 Visitors
