Landing Page Optimization – The odd impact of a red arrow
Those of you in the Internet Marketing circles must have come across Alex Mandossian’s Marketing with Postcards site. I’ve always liked Alex’s style of setting up landing pages and one element of his Marketing with Postcards page really caught my eye – the flashing red arrow pointing to the sign up form. I wondered if Alex had strategically placed the arrow because he found it impacted signups.
Here’s a screenshot of Mandossian’s page. Note the red arrow pointing to the signup form.
I decided to test the impact of the flashing red arrow on several landing pages for Adwords traffic from Google.
Here’s the footer of the test page:
Just Fill in the Form on the Right to Access the the Website and Receive a Free 55 page Book. It’s Free.I was pretty sure the red arrow would cause visitors to focus more on the sign-up form and stay on the page longer. But I was wrong. The test case is shown below:
In every case, the landing pages without a red arrow outperformed pages with the arrow by a HUGE 10 – 20%. I’m not really sure why. Perhaps the moving red arrow added an aura of sale-y-ness to the site that turned off potential subscribers. Thoughts?
I think this post was secretly a great start to a potential series of articles about this topic. A lot of people act like they know what they are writing about when it comes to this topic and generally, very few people actually get it. You seem to understand it though, so I think you should start writing more. Thanks!