How Google Sign In / SSO affects new user conversion
April 21, 2026
Earlier this month, we added Sign in with Google.
In addition to better security, we wanted to make it as easy as possible to create a new Clicky account. This should result in more new user accounts being created, but what kind of numbers are we actually seeing?
As you can see from the graph above, the difference was obvious and immediate.
In the two weeks following the release of this feature, we saw an average 40% increase in new accounts per day, vs the same period one month prior. Of these 14 full days, 10 were significantly better (mostly between 50-100% increase). The other 4 days were roughly the same.
Even though this period included a very major religious holiday weekend (Easter), where overall traffic for most websites drops significantly for 4 days... the numbers were still up! Compare that vs the left half the graph (late March, aka Spring Break (in the US at least)): There's a sustained decrease for ~10 days, vs the month prior. That's a pretty amazing difference, eh?
Does this mean more premium upgrades?
We offer a 21 day premium trial with all new accounts, so it's too soon for that trend to emerge. However, the early data is certainly encouraging:
- within the last 7 days, we had the most single-day upgrades since our thanksgiving weekend sales 5 months ago
- another recent day we had the most single-day upgrades in almost 2 months
Don't be an A-hole!
As I mentioned in the previous annoucement post, I am constantly floored by the number of sites that let you register with Google sign in, only to make you go through their entire manual account creation process afterwards anyways, including creating a password. That kind of a-hole design is indicative of the people running whatever service it might be, so I will almost always just immediately abandon the registration process with sites that do that. I want literally nothing to do with them!
So, obviously, we don't do that. Creating a new account via Google sign in is the exact same process as logging in with Google sign in: You're done seconds! Hence this advice: if you add Google sign in to your service, or another SSO provider, make sure you do the same thing! 😜