Removing banners on the homepage

Pinmart.com is an online store selling ready made label pins and custom pins. The company is based in Elk Grove Village, Il (US) and was established in 1964. Pinmart hired an agency American Eagle to improve the conversion of the site.

The team found that the homepage had too much information – leading to ‘cognitive load’ for the visitors. I was difficult to even digest the messaging on the banners on the homepage. Most visitors would probably take the easy route of just clicking into the main navigation or using the internal site search, if they don’t leave first!

Hypothesis

Removing banners from 9 to 6 on the homepage leads to more transactions, because the homepage will be less cluttered with different banners and different messsages.

Results

50% of the visitors saw the original and the other 50% visitors saw the test variation. Then total banner clicks was measured between the original and the variation. The test variation was the clear winner, providing a 10% increase on aggregate banner clicks despite the fact that 3 banners were removed. In addition, overall transactions went up 1.9%.

Learnings

Less is more – apparently too many messages is overwhelming the visitor and is not inviting them to click and further explore the site.

Note that the Conversion Agency is talking about ‘banner blindness’. This may be a matter of definition – but banner blindmness mind be more appropiate in test where banner versus no banner is tested or when a banner is designed to look less like a ‘traditional’ banner.