Win Report: How changing one image almost doubled conversions

Published: February 2024

Win Reports help you to grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each article highlights a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next two minutes, we’ll show you how a single research insight improved the conversion rate by 96% for a website monitoring service.
The image compares two web pages that are largely the same. The Control page includes a friendly illustration. The Variation page replaces it with screenshots of the StatusCake UI on a laptop, phone, and tablet.

StatusCake provides website monitoring services for website owners and IT professionals around the world. It is trusted by over 120,000 companies, from agile startups to giants like Netflix, Audi, and Mastercard.

How might a single test—changing one image—almost double conversion?

Research: Listening to the target market

As part of our research process, we ask qualified participants to evaluate the leading website monitoring services, including our client’s. Their feedback often surprises us (and the client) and always offers insight into their decision-making process. In this case, participants said things like:

“Nice UI and information-packed.”

“…the UI of the other platforms looks better.”

“I like that there are screen grabs… it shows me how the app looks.”

“I liked [the] large image of the UI. This shows me what I want to see…”

Responses like these emphasized the importance of the user interface in the buying decision. But more than that, a lack of clear screenshots on StatusCake’s site was seen as a negative. In addition, some users told us that:

  • The site lacked the clear UI screenshots they saw on some other sites.
  • They disliked the hand-drawn illustrations that StatusCake used, seeing them as ill-suited to an enterprise application.

Taken together, the research suggested an interesting hypothesis for testing.

The original PPC page (or control)

We tested our hypothesis on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) landing page. The original page featured an image that followed StatusCake’s hand-drawn style. Here it is:

The screenshot shows the StatusCake logo, a headline that reads “Is your website down?” and a cartoon illustration of a customer with her hands in the air.
The Control: In the illustration, a user throws up her hands in surprise as her website goes down.

The tested page (or variation)

Based on our hypothesis, the variation replaced the illustration with a montage of StatusCake’s awesome UI on a variety of devices.

In this screenshot, a montage of UI images replaces the illustration of the customer.
The Variation: The illustration is replaced by screenshots of StatusCake’s UI.

Result: Conversions increased by 96%

During the test, the variation saw a 96% increase in trial sign-ups.

If you’ve read our previous Win Report, How blurring the results doubled sign-ups for a utility comparison website, you might recognize the UI montage as a subtle form of future pacing— helping users imagine that they already have their desired result.

To learn more about future pacing, see Why many visitors abandon because they don’t understand what they’ll get.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of StatusCake’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to StatusCake for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

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