Are Image Sliders Costing you Conversions?
Does your website use one of the ever popular image sliders also known as carousels? Over recent years these have become increasingly popular. Nearly every website has one (ServerTastic included). However according to ConversionXL these are conversion killers.
The article highlights an ongoing discussion on StackExchange about how crap they really are. Some of the comments talk about banner blindness where users just ignore them like banner ads. Another problem is slide frequency. Too fast and the visitor doesn’t have chance to absorb the info, too slow and the visitor has clicked elsewhere before another image has loaded. The constant movement can also distract the eye from reading another important message.
But I mentioned above that we have one on ServerTastic. As an ecommerce business we perform a lot of tracking on our website. Including the performance of certain links. Our main analytics come via GetClicky (rather than the ever popular Google Analytics). Using link tagging I can see the following top level stats for the STHEADER
On the face of it the image slider is generating revenue ($1,277). But what we don’t know is the revenue difference if the image slider didn’t exist. So we turned to Visual Website Optimiser (which integrates with GetClicky). Using VWO we quickly created a version of the page with the image slider and one without. We also added the tracking code to our checkout pages to report revenue generated. At the moment the non-slider variant has a 36% chance of beating the original. However the sample size is fairly small at present so we will have to wait and see which one wins! I will report back once we have more data.
What do you think — Do you use image sliders and do you think/know they work for you?
