Should you center or left-align text within the hero section of a web page and can such a simple change impact business outcomes? The answer might surprise you.
Watch this episode of The Cro Show, a game show for conversion rate optimization and marketing experimentation fans, and see if you can guess which test variation performed better during a recent Cro Metrics client experiment.
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Full Transcript:
Alex Loesch: So for this client, what they do is they have a few different lines of businesses, the one that we’re focusing on here and this test is looking at the premier agent.
So what this is is basically a platform that they supply to real estate agents that allow them to connect directly with buyers and really facilitate that process more easily.
So this was a pretty simple test – I might be cheating a little bit because it’s Grant’s test – but I thought the results were very interesting.
The idea here was to center the hero copy and CTA on this page, so this is one of the more informational pages on the actual real estate agent – premier agent section of the site.
So what we’re looking to improve here is the CTA clicks on the hero, the leads generated – so there’s a form that populates when you click “get started” and you go through it – and then the form engagement. So how far they actually getting in the form, what are they clicking on and just overall increasing up.
Do you have any questions about this one? I think it’s a pretty simple one, but…
Elease Humes: What is that check box at the bottom?
Alex Loesch: So that is a “more” – little kind of carrot symbol. So if you click it, it brings you lower on the page to learn more about the actual product and what you would get if you signed up as a real estate agent.
Cristi Alvarez: So, Alex, just the text and everything here is the same. All it was just kind of centering everything so that the line of like your eye kind of takes you down page?
Alex Loesch: Yeah. So on the actual way that it looked during the tests, it’s exactly the same. It’s just centered. So yeah, that’s really the only change.
This came about. I believe the client really just wanted to see how this fared and how we could – potentially if this did win – how would we be able to bring this to other hero images on this site and also other LOBs.
Cristi Alvarez: Cool, so it’s almost like future proofing what you could do more with the hero imagery, yeah.
Chris Neumann: Is this just the desktop or mobile too?
Alex Loesch: Just desktop. I should’ve probably said that, but just desktop.
Christine Nguyen: And one more question. So other than like the alignment, were there any text changes at all? Styling changes?
Alex Loesch: No, no. It might look a little different here because this is the marks in the dash, but the actual one shouldn’t have really changed at all.
Awesome. So if we don’t have any more questions – oh wait, no… we need to vote.
So if you think so, if you think that variation one put a thumbs up if you think control won a thumbs down.
Interesting. Oh, it looks like kind of like a 50 50 split here. Just like this experiment.
OK. So we’ll go show the results now the variation won, actually, with pretty great results here.
So essentially we saw a four percent increase in true leads at 80 percent statistical significance. Higher engagement for the hero clicks, as well as form engagement by 20 percent and 16 percent.
Both of those were at ninety nine percent statistical significance.
This ran for about three weeks, so this was a very interesting one because this goes to show the smallest changes or changes that you sometimes don’t even think about really do drive significant lifts in your major KPIs.
Our hypothesis here is that the way that it’s positioned as the eye tends to gravitate, usually towards the center of the page, or at least that’s the hypothesis here.
And so the get started, it really pops out a little bit more to users once they land on the page and the text is, you know, a little bit easier to digest because it’s in the center and this seem to resonate very well with users.
Cristi Alvarez: Thanks for watching. Be sure to subscribe to have more test ideas sent to your inbox.