# Big red Holiday Sale message vs sidebar: bounce rate 76% to 60%

- Outcome: Won
- Page type: Homepage (Ecommerce)
- Elements: Sales, urgency & limited-time offers, Layout, fonts & visual design
- Test run by: [MedaliaArt](https://liftarchive.com/practitioners/medaliaart/)
- Commentary by: LiftArchive (our analysis, not theirs)
- Original source: https://wingify.com/success-stories/medaliaart/
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/medaliaart-holiday-sale-message-prominent-vs-sidebar/

Showing the Holiday Sale message in big red type on the homepage, instead of small text in the sidebar, cut the bounce rate from 76% to 60%. MedaliaArt, an online painting gallery, ran this test itself, and it was published as a VWO case study. The sample was very small, at 268 visitors.

## Result

**bounce rate 76% to 60%**

- Bounce rate: 76% with the sidebar message and 60% with the prominent one, a 21% drop.
- Click rate: 24% (35 of 145 visitors) versus 40% (49 of 123 visitors). Any click on a homepage link counted as a conversion.
- Reported at 95% confidence after 2 weeks, but on only 268 visitors in total.
- Sales were not measured, so the effect on revenue is unknown.

## Control

The homepage mentioned the Holiday Sale, with 5% to 55% off paintings, in small text in the sidebar.

## Variant

The same Holiday Sale message appeared in big red type in a prominent spot on the homepage.

## Why it likely won (our reading)

- A sale of up to 55% off gives visitors a reason to look around, but only if they notice it.
- Small sidebar text is easy to miss, so many visitors may never have known a sale was on.
- The worry that a loud message would feel intrusive did not show up in the bounce rate.

## Caveats

With just 268 visitors, the result could easily shift with more data. The test tracked clicks rather than sales, and no version without the sale message was tested.

## How to run this test

- Hypothesis: If we show our sale message large and prominent on the homepage instead of in the sidebar, then fewer visitors will bounce because more of them will notice the discount.
- Primary metric: Revenue per visitor
- Guardrail: Bounce rate
- Guardrail: Average order value
- Guardrail: Margin per order
- Who should test it: Stores running a real, sizable sale that is currently easy to miss. It may not help if the sale is small, or if a loud banner pushes your main products out of view.

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Credit: MedaliaArt ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/medaliaart-holiday-sale-message-prominent-vs-sidebar/).
Usage: Free to use, quote and build on, with credit and a link: name the practitioner or organization that ran the test and link to its LiftArchive page. The results belong to the practitioners who ran and shared them; the summaries and commentary are LiftArchive's.