Download text link turned into a blue button: about +100% downloads
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsPatrick McKenzie replaced Bingo Card Creator's plain free-trial text link with a blue button image and reported roughly double the conversion rate to trial downloads.
This was a before/after change, not a split test.
It was published on the Kalzumeus blog in 2006.
- Conversion to trial download: about +100%, as stated by the author.
- No visitor counts, test length or significance were shared for this change.
- The author generally left each tweak live for two to five weekdays before judging it.
The change
Plain download link replaced with a blue button image
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
The free trial was offered through an understated text link on the site.
Variant
A graphical button that looked clickable, read "Download / Free Trial" on two lines, and was coloured blue to stand out against the orange, yellow and white site.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- A button that looks like a button tells visitors at a glance that they can click it.
- Plain, specific text (download, free trial) removes any doubt about what happens next.
- A contrasting colour made the main action hard to miss on a busy page.
Caveats: Sequential before/after change on a tiny, new one-person business in 2006, not a split test, as the author says. Bingo Card Creator was downloadable desktop software at the time, not SaaS.
Who ran it
Patrick McKenzie ran this test and published the results (Kalzumeus (patio11) blog). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on Patrick McKenzie →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we turn our main trial or sign-up link into a clear, high-contrast button with plain text, then more visitors will start a trial because the next step is obvious.
- Primary metric
- Trial starts (or sign-ups) per visitor
- Guardrails
- Trial-to-paid conversion
- Bounce rate on the sign-up page
- Who should test it
- SaaS founders whose main call to action is still a text link or blends into the page. Most modern sites already use a clear button, so expect far less than a doubling.
Questions
Do buttons convert better than text links?
Often, for a page's main action. In this 2006 before/after change, swapping a text link for a button image roughly doubled trial downloads, though it was not a split test.
What colour should a call-to-action button be?
There is no single best colour. What matters is contrast with the rest of the page, which is why blue worked on an orange and white site here.