Does a Poll or Chart Increase Time on Page?

Blog posts with embedded polls and charts will show higher average session duration and engagement rate compared to the same post without interactive elements.

Content marketers have been told for years that interactive elements increase engagement, but the evidence is secondhand: recycled stats from 2016-era studies with no verifiable methodology. We are running a controlled A/B test on this very blog post to generate first-party evidence. Half of visitors see an embedded poll and chart. The other half see the same post without interactive elements. GA4 tracks session duration and engagement rate for each variant independently.

A/B split test using cookie-based variant assignment (50/50 split). Variant A includes an embedded poll and poll-backed chart. Variant B replaces them with minimal placeholders that preserve layout but remove interactivity. GA4 custom dimension tracks which variant each visitor sees. Weekly snapshots collect per-variant metrics: pageviews, sessions, engagement rate, and average session duration. Statistical significance tested via Mann-Whitney U test with a minimum of 200 sessions per variant before drawing conclusions. The experiment runs for 6 weeks or until significance is reached, whichever comes first.