Top Deals banner on garden-advice pages: +104.99% visits to deals
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsAdding a Top Deals banner to the top of garden-advice pages more than doubled visits to the Top Deals section, up 104.99%.
Bakker Hillegom, an online seller of plants, bulbs and garden supplies, ran this test itself, and it was published as a VWO case study.
A newsletter signup banner was added at the same time, and sales were not reported.
- Visits to Top Deals: +104.99% versus the original, at 99.99% significance.
- The test ran for 12 days on 8,000 visitors.
- Sales and newsletter signups were not reported, so the revenue effect is unknown.
The change
Top Deals and newsletter banners added to the top of advice pages
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
The garden-advice pages had no promotional banner. Top Deals could only be found in a drop-down menu.
Variant
Two prominent banners were placed at the top of every info page: one for Top Deals, linking to discounted products, and one for newsletter signup.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Many visitors came to read advice and then left. The original pages gave them no clear next step.
- Moving Top Deals from a drop-down to the top of the page made it hard to miss.
- The word deals promises a saving, which gives a reader a reason to click.
Caveats: This measured clicks to Top Deals only; sales were not reported. Two banners were added together, so the newsletter banner may also have affected behavior.
Who ran it
Bakker Hillegom ran this test for Bakker Hillegom 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 Bakker Hillegom →
How to run this test on your store
- Hypothesis
- If we add a prominent deals banner to the top of our content pages, then more readers will visit product pages because they get a clear, appealing next step.
- Primary metric
- Clicks from content pages to the deals page
- Guardrails
- Orders from content-page visitors
- Time on page
- Bounce rate
- Who should test it
- Stores with blogs or how-to content that draws lots of readers who rarely shop. If your content readers are mostly researchers far from buying, expect more clicks but few extra sales.
Questions
How do I get blog readers to shop?
Give them a clear, visible next step. Here, a Top Deals banner at the top of advice pages roughly doubled visits to the deals section.
Do banners on content pages increase sales?
They can increase clicks, but this test did not report sales.
Track orders as well as clicks before calling it a win.
Should a store hide deals in a menu?
A link buried in a drop-down tends to be found only by shoppers already looking for it.
Surfacing it on busy pages reaches more people.
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