WOW award badge instead of a Twitter follower count: +72.05% clicks
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsReplacing a badge showing 4,000+ Twitter followers with a WOW business award badge lifted visits to partner retailer sites by 72.05%.
Bag Servant, a handbag shopping site that sends buyers to affiliate stores, ran this A/B test itself, and it was published as a VWO case study.
Engagement also rose 10.27%, both at 98% confidence.
- Visits to partner retailer sites: +72.05%, at 98% confidence. This is the main conversion for an affiliate site.
- Site engagement: +10.27%, at 98% confidence.
- Homepage product exploration: +60.42%, but only at 93% confidence, so treat this one as less certain.
- Sample size and test length were not shared.
The change
The Twitter follower badge is swapped for a WOW award badge.
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
The page showed a badge with the site's Twitter follower count of 4,000+.
Variant
The follower count was replaced with a WOW badge, a business award that is relatively hard to get.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- An award that is hard to win says more about quality than a follower count anyone could build.
- A badge from an outside judge feels like an endorsement, while follower numbers only show popularity.
- For a site that hands shoppers off to other stores, looking credible may make people more willing to click through.
Caveats: Bag Servant is an affiliate site, so the conversion is an outbound click, not a sale. No sample size or test length was given.
Who ran it
Bag Servant ran this test for Bag Servant and published the results (VWO case study). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on Bag Servant →
How to run this test on your store
- Hypothesis
- If we replace a social follower count with a respected third-party award badge, then more visitors will click through because the award signals quality rather than just popularity.
- Primary metric
- Click-throughs to partner or product pages
- Guardrails
- Bounce rate
- Pages per session
- Revenue per click from partners
- Who should test it
- Sites and stores that hold a real award or certification that their audience would recognize. It won't help if the award is obscure, and never show a badge you didn't earn.
Questions
Are award badges better than social media follower counts?
In this test they were. An earned award lifted partner clicks by 72.05% over a follower count, likely because it signals quality, not just reach.
Does a trust badge help on every page?
No. The same site found that adding other trust badges to its search page hurt every goal, so context matters.
What makes a trust badge credible?
It should come from a source your visitors know and be hard to get.
Badges that look generic or easy to claim tend to carry little weight.
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