Colorful two-column lender landing page lost: control won by 51.52%
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsA more colorful, two-column redesign of a PPC landing page lost to the plain placeholder page it replaced, which converted 51.52% better on quote requests.
XBanker, a lender, ran the test and attendee Ryan Hutchings submitted it to a MarketingExperiments web clinic, where it was published.
The redesign changed color, layout, text styling and form design all at once, so the loss can't be pinned on a single element.
- Quote requests (conversion): the control beat the redesign by 51.52%. This is a loss for the variant.
- An earlier two-column treatment of the same page lost to the control by 85.51%, so the plain page won twice in a row.
- The clinic audience predicted the redesign would win and rated it more visually appealing. Their preference did not match visitor behavior.
- Visitor and conversion counts were not shared.
The change
The variant moved to a colorful two-column layout with red text linking headline, testimonials and button.
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
A quickly built placeholder landing page with a direct eye path, few links and a quote request form sitting in that path. The button copy repeated the main headline.
Variant
A more colorful two-column design that used red text to tie headlines, subheads, testimonials and button copy together. It also had a darker grey background, more visible form drop-downs and the call to action above the fold.
Why it likely lost
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- The plain page kept a single, direct path from headline to form. The two-column layout split attention between columns.
- Red text used on many elements may have made everything look equally important, so nothing guided the eye.
- MarketingExperiments' reading: neither treatment matched the order in which prospects think through the offer as well as the original did.
- A polished look does not help if it slows down the visitor's main task: asking for a quote.
Caveats: Several changes shipped together (layout, color, text styling, form design), so no single element explains the result. The tests ran one after another in 2009 and no sample sizes or confidence levels were shared.
Who ran it
XBanker ran this test for a lender running PPC lead generation and published the results (MarketingExperiments). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on XBanker →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we redesign our PPC landing page with a richer two-column layout, then quote requests will rise because the page looks more credible, unless the extra design pulls attention from the form.
- Primary metric
- Quote request (lead form) conversion rate from PPC traffic
- Guardrails
- Lead quality or qualified-lead rate
- Form start rate
- Cost per lead
- Who should test it
- Lead-gen businesses sending paid traffic to a simple, single-path landing page. Test a redesign before replacing a plain page that already converts; it is less useful if the current page is genuinely confusing or broken.
Questions
Should a landing page be one column or two columns?
There is no fixed rule. In this test a simple single-path page beat two different two-column versions, so test it rather than assume a two-column layout looks more trustworthy.
Why can a quick placeholder page beat a designed one?
Quick pages often state the offer plainly and keep the form in the eye path.
Added design can bring in distractions or make the main action harder to find.
Can I trust a panel's prediction of which page will win?
Not on its own. The clinic audience picked the redesign here and was wrong, which is why the test mattered.