Thumbnail images in SAP's Spotlights section: +62% engagement
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsAdding thumbnail images and clearer calls to action to the text-heavy Spotlights section on SAP.com lifted engagement by 62%.
SAP's in-house test lab ran this test, and it was published on the MarketingExperiments blog.
A second treatment with the clearer calls to action but no images lost, which pointed to the images as the main driver.
- Engagement (clicks on the section's calls to action): +62% for the version with images, as an aggregate across seven country sites.
- The treatment with clearer calls to action but no images lost to the image version, so the team credited the lift to the imagery.
- Results varied by country: the China site engaged 433% more than the US site, so the effect is not uniform across markets.
The change
The Spotlights section gains thumbnail images and clearer calls to action
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
The Spotlights section on the SAP.com homepage was mostly text. It was meant to send visitors to deeper, topic-specific content.
Variant
Each Spotlights item got a thumbnail image and a clearer call to action. A separate treatment kept the new calls to action but left out the images.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Images give the eye a place to land in a dense block of text, so visitors notice the links at all.
- A relevant thumbnail can hint at what the content is about before anyone reads the copy.
- Visitors in some markets may respond more strongly to visual layouts, which could explain the large gap between the China and US sites.
Caveats: The test dates from 2013 and the source does not share sample size, duration or confidence. The 62% figure is an aggregate across seven country sites, and individual sites varied widely.
Who ran it
SAP ran this test and published the results (MarketingExperiments). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on SAP →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we add relevant thumbnail images to a text-heavy content section, then more visitors will click through to deeper content because the images draw attention and signal what each item is about.
- Primary metric
- Click-through rate on the section's calls to action
- Guardrails
- Clicks on the main homepage call to action (demo or trial)
- Page load time
- Downstream conversions from the clicked content
- Who should test it
- B2B software sites with dense homepage content blocks that feed visitors to resources or product pages. It is less likely to help if the section already uses images or if the goal is a single primary action.
Questions
Do images on a homepage increase clicks?
They can. In this SAP test, adding thumbnails to a text-heavy section lifted clicks by 62%, and a version with better calls to action but no images lost.
How do you know the images caused the lift and not the new calls to action?
SAP ran a second treatment with the clearer calls to action but no images.
It lost, which suggests the images did most of the work.
Should B2B sites test the same change in every country?
Segment results by country if you can. SAP saw a much bigger response on its China site than on its US site.