# Thumbnail images in SAP's Spotlights section: +62% engagement

- Outcome: Won
- Page type: Homepage (SaaS)
- Elements: Images, Cta copy
- Date shared: 2013-05
- Test run by: [SAP](https://liftarchive.com/practitioners/sap/)
- Commentary by: LiftArchive (our analysis, not theirs)
- Original source: https://marketingexperiments.com/a-b-testing/increase-conversion-images-testing
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/sap-spotlights-thumbnails/

Adding 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.

## Result

**+62% engagement**

- 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.

## 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)

- 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.

## How to run this test

- 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
- Guardrail: Clicks on the main homepage call to action (demo or trial)
- Guardrail: Page load time
- Guardrail: 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.

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Credit: SAP ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/sap-spotlights-thumbnails/).
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.