Human Photos Double your Conversion Rate
By Paras Chopra
10 May 2010 | Category: Design
Editors Note: In his second article for Think Vitamin Paras Chopra looks at how human photos can increase dramatically increase your conversion rate. For further reads check out Paras' first article "The Business Case for A/B Testing" and ways in which you can "Designing for Conversion Experiences" by Chrissie Brodigan.
It is a well studied scientific fact that in a scene or image full of different objects, one’s attention is subconsciously drawn to human faces. Even toddlers and monkeys look towards faces for a much longer duration than they’d look at other objects.
Independent Tests Yield Same Result
I have analyzed two A/B testing case studies of Visual Website Optimizer users and have concluded that the sure fire way of catching visitors attention is having human photos on a website.
What’s interesting is that even though both tests were independent, they (surprisingly) tested the same aspect and arrived at the same result. This gives me confidence that there is something special about having human photos on a website which increases conversion rate instantly. Let's have a look at the two studies.
Case Study #1
Medalia Art sell Brazilian and Caribbean art online and they recently got pleasantly surprised when photos of artists on their homepage increased visitor engagement by 90%. This wasn’t their first A/B test as they keep playing with their homepage. In the past, they successfully reduced bounce rate by 20% by testing the placement of their promotional message.
As can be expected from an online art shop, they showcase paintings from three famous artists on their homepage. This time, for no good reason they decided to see what happens if paintings are replaced by the artists’ photos. I tried to probe Medalia Art for reasons why they came up with this idea but they said it was a completely random choice to test paintings v/s photos.
The goal for this A/B test was to increase visitor engagement (defined as a click on any link on the homepage; it is the inverse of the bounce rate). They didn’t use sales as a conversion rate as many of their sales happen after interaction on the telephone (and a lot of haggling) with the customer.
Here are the screenshots of the control (paintings) and the winning version (photos).
Control (Paintings)
Variation (Photos)
Test results are as follows:
| Variation | Conversion Rate | % Improvement |
| With paintings (control) | 8.8% | - |
| With photos (variation) | 17.2% | +95% |
Clearly, version with artists’ photos had a much better conversion rate that the version with artists’ paintings. In fact, the winning variation almost doubled the conversion rate on the homepage.
Case Study #2
EmptyMind is a web analytics and optimization blog by Jason Thompson. There is a large phone icon in the blog’s sidebar which links to his contact us page. Unlike Medalia Art who did the test just to check what happens, Jason had a reason for running a phone icon v/s his photograph test on the site.
While attending a summit, he got several comments from other people that he didn’t look like his (then) Twitter icon. So he thought it would be best to have a single photo representing him across all the social network sites he uses. Testing the photo on the blog was just an extension of that thought.
The goal for the test was visits to Jason’s contact us page and here are the variations and their performance:
| Control | Variation |
 |
 |
| Conversion Rate: 3.7% | Conversion Rate: 5.5% |
| Increase in Conversion Rate: +48% | |
Here is what Jason said about the test results:
People want to connect with other people emotionally, the photo makes that emotional connection so much easier and as the test is proving, drives people to the contact form more than a nondescript icon.
The Key Lesson
Both case studies independently arrived at the same (statistically significant) result that human photo(s) increased conversion rate. This proves that there is certainly something magical about human photos.
I am going to try this test on Visual Website Optimizer homepage (perhaps using customer photos for testimonials). If it is relevant for your website, I recommend you try an A/B test to see if a human photo can do wonders for your business too.
If you try out a test involving human photos and get positive results, then we may have discovered a great formula for increasing conversion rates!
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