Removing featured talent from homepage: +33% sign-ups
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsRemoving a section of 10 featured voice actor profiles from the homepage raised new account sign-ups by 33%, and a rerun confirmed a 28% lift.
Voices.com, a marketplace that connects clients with voice talent, ran this A/B test and it was published as a MarketingSherpa case study.
Less content on the homepage led to more sign-ups.
- New account sign-ups: +33% for the version without talent profiles over a 10-day test.
- Rerun: +28% sign-ups, so the result held when tested again.
- Both lifts are far above the site's normal daily variance of about 0.4%, which the team measured before testing.
The change
The variant drops the 10 featured talent profiles.
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
The homepage showed photos and profile links for 10 featured voice actors, five men and five women.
Variant
The featured talent section was removed, leaving visitors to focus on the service itself.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Showing just 10 actors may have made the marketplace look small, as if only those 10 were available. This was the CEO's own theory.
- The profiles were the 10 most recently hired actors, picked automatically, so some had default avatars or poor photos that hurt the brand.
- Without the section, visitors had fewer distractions between the value message and the sign-up path.
Caveats: Traffic and sign-up counts were not shared, and the data dates from 2014.
Who ran it
Voices.com ran this test and published the results (MarketingSherpa case study). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on Voices.com →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we remove the featured profiles section from our homepage, then more visitors will sign up, because the page will focus on our value and stop suggesting a small catalog.
- Primary metric
- New account sign-ups from the homepage
- Guardrails
- Sign-up quality, such as accounts that post a job or complete a profile
- Searches started from the homepage
- Bounce rate
- Who should test it
- Marketplaces and SaaS platforms that show a small, auto-picked sample of supply or customers on the homepage. If your featured items are hand-picked and look polished, the effect may be smaller.
Questions
Should a marketplace show featured profiles on its homepage?
Not always. Voices.com got more sign-ups without them, likely because 10 profiles made the catalog look small. Test removing them before assuming they help.
Why rerun an A/B test that already won?
A rerun checks that the first result was not luck or a traffic blip.
Voices.com reran this test and saw a similar lift of 28%.