Moving try/buy CTAs above the fold: +956% clickthrough
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsMoving the try and buy calls-to-action above the fold on VMware's SMB solutions page lifted clickthrough by 956%.
VMware's digital marketing team ran the test, and it was published by MarketingExperiments from a Web Optimization Summit 2014 talk.
Small copy changes shipped with the move, so placement and copy share the credit.
- Clickthrough up 956% on try, buy and engagement clicks.
- The test was a three-way 33/33/33 split: control and two variants. The post does not say in text which variant produced the 956%.
- Confidence level, sample size and downstream trials or purchases were not shared.
The change
Try and buy CTAs move from the bottom links to above the fold.
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
An SMB solutions page featuring several products, with the try and buy calls-to-action buried among links at the bottom.
Variant
CTAs for vSphere Essentials and vCenter Log Insight moved above the fold, with subtle copy changes. Two variants were tested.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Visitors who wanted to try or buy no longer had to scroll to the bottom and hunt through links.
- A clear, visible action next to the product pitch makes the next step obvious.
- The starting point was weak, which makes a very large relative lift easier to reach.
Caveats: Copy tweaks were bundled with the placement change. The result measures clicks, not trials or sales, and dates from 2014.
Who ran it
VMware 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 VMware →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we move our main try and buy CTAs above the fold, then more visitors will click through because the next step is visible without scrolling.
- Primary metric
- Clickthrough on try and buy CTAs
- Guardrails
- Trial starts or purchases from those clicks
- Engagement with other products on the page
- Bounce rate
- Who should test it
- SaaS companies with multi-product or solutions pages where the main actions sit low on the page. If your CTA is already prominent at the top, this won't help much.
Questions
Does putting a CTA above the fold increase clicks?
When the CTA was hard to find before, it often does.
VMware saw a 956% rise after moving buried CTAs up.
Is a big clickthrough lift the same as more sales?
No. Clicks are an early step, so also track trials, purchases or leads from those clicks.
Should I test copy and placement together?
It is faster, but you won't know which change did the work.
Test them separately if you need to know.