Rotating Offers – the Scourge of Home Page Design
As Conversion Optimization Professionals, our job is to identify components of websites that are hurting the company’s conversion rates and revenue.
In some cases, where the site has already been tested or happens to be well-planned, we have to dig deep in our bag of tricks to develop the test plan.
Other times, the site gives us a gift with components that are common conversion killers. One of the most common of these gifts is the rotating home page offer banner.
We love offer banners! They give us lots of great opportunities to easily beat the Control page with our newly designed test Variations.
Should I use a rotating home page offer banner?
That’s a question I’m often asked when I present at conferences and webinars. Unfortunately for the questioner, they are addressing a common cause of Relevance, Clarity and Distraction problems. (Note: For more information on these and the other three Conversion Rate Factors, read up on the LIFT Framework that we use to analyze landing pages)
I decided to visit an arbitrary sampling of home pages today and found nearly all of them featuring some form of a gallery rotator.
Now, I’ll preface the remarks below by saying that there are some excellent uses for a rotating gallery. For example, to display images of home page rotating banners. See below for examples by the Gap, Adobe, Home Depot, Hilton and more. (How do you like the meta message I used there? This post is like an onion. Layered…)
Home Page Rotating Offer Gallery Examples
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Canon.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
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Canon.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
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Forever21.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
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Gap.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
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Gap.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
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Hilton.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
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Hilton.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
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HomeDepot.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
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IBM.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
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IBM.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
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MarthaStewart.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
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Omniture.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
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Zappos.com Home Page rotating offer gallery
(Click above to view full size)
We have tested rotating offers many times and have found it to be a poor way of presenting home page content.
The problem with home page rotating features
Let’s think about your visitor’s experience for a moment.
- She arrives on your home page and needs to orient herself to your layout in order to decide which information to zero in on. A strong, page-dominant banner with a headline and bold image is where she’s likely going to start her focus.
- Unfortunately, the message in that banner usually isn’t relevant to what she’s looking for. Why? The marketing department is featuring current events, offers and news that may be important to some department within the organization but not to the majority of the visitors.
- In the lucky event that your visitor sees an offer that looks interesting to her, she will want to read a little more about it. But, just as she’s gathered the motivation to click through and learn more… the rotator switches to the next offer.
- What happens now? She’s confronted with a second offer and now has to decide whether to focus on reading it or to go back to the previous. She’s feeling some frustration and disorientation at this point.
- If she decides that the first offer was what she really wanted to see, how does she get back to it? She has to figure out the usability of this gallery. The Art Director surely would have made it easy to navigate back and forth between the offers, right?
- Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case. Your beleaguered visitor may have to locate a tiny row of dots or squares hidden among the bold, colorful photos in the offer onslaught.
- You can, I’m sure, empathize with her likely reaction, which is to bounce off the site in frustration.
The Politics of Home Page Design
The root of the your home page design problem may not lie solely with your Art Director, though.
The problem may be with an organization that is not clear on its business goals, marketing goals and website goals. When organizational politics, inter-departmental jockeying for position and lack of customer-orientation trump Clarity of your Value Proposition, an offer gallery emerges.
Why?
It is the only way your Art Director has found to give all of the competing messages equal priority in the limited home page space.
To avoid this problem:
- Begin your website evaluation with a strategic website planning exercise to prioritize your website goals and Conversion Optimization opportunities
- Commit to controlled, statistically valid testing on your most important website pages, templates and marketing landing pages
- Bring in third party Conversion Optimization experts to help you win the organizational buy-in you need to be a Marketing Optimization Champion
October 24th, 2011 at 5:09 am
Chris, I'm so glad you posted this.
Do you have an ideal alternative to the rotating banner? In other words, what did you test against? Some options include a segmented banner, a single-offer banner and no banner.
One point you didn't touch on is that when the reader finally moves on and begins scanning the rest of the home page, the rotating header is like a TV blaring in another room, always distracting the visitor, limiting their ability to consume the page.
October 24th, 2011 at 8:54 am
Thanks for stopping by, Brian.
There are quite a few options that seem to work better than rotators. The best option depends on the breadth of products.
We haven't posted a public case study on this specific type of test yet, but I hope to get permission to share one soon.
Here's another home page test case study that's interesting, though: http://www.widerfunnel.com/proof/case-studies/hom…
Hope to see you again at PubCon next month.
October 25th, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Very interesting stuff here. Incredibly basic stuff, that I think goes right over a lot of our heads. We are engrained to do as we see, and the rotating banner is pretty popular. I think I may create one banner around some of my store's core values and best seller and see how it works (fast shipping, great prices, etc)
October 25th, 2011 at 2:20 pm
Sounds like a good test, Brian. Please stop by and share your results when it's done!
October 28th, 2011 at 6:03 am
[...] Rotating Offers – the Scourge of Home Page Design – Wide [...]
October 28th, 2011 at 7:33 am
[...] Rotating Offers – the Scourge of Home Page Design – Wide [...]
October 28th, 2011 at 7:36 am
[...] Usability-Problem und Conversion-Killer?von Julia Pilz am 28.10.2011 Tweet Vor einigen Tagen hat widerfunnel.com über dieses Thema berichtet. Allerdings wurden dabei lediglich die Nachteile über den Einsatz [...]
October 29th, 2011 at 8:27 pm
[...] Rotating Offers – the Scourge of Home Page Design – Wide [...]
October 29th, 2011 at 10:02 pm
[...] Rotating Offers – the Scourge of Home Page Design – Wide [...]
October 31st, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Thanks, Chris. You're one of four of my CRO Super-Heroes who says this! MUCH appreciated for the on the record blog post!
November 7th, 2011 at 10:08 am
I know I promised to blog about this for you a while ago. Thanks for stopping by, Rob! Look forward to seeing you again at PubCon this week.
November 14th, 2011 at 12:05 pm
It's an excellent post Chris – and certainly a valid observation. But most of the "problems" you cite come down to personalization, and I think the reason many sites adopt scrolling rotators on their hompeage is because they have not gotten down to the level of a personalized experience yet. It's a matter of maturation, if you had the data and the technology and/or resources to personalize the homepage promo then you could, using your advice, target the content more specifically to that user and achieve better results.
As we know, there are many great personalization tools out there – but the technology is (fairly) new, and expensive. The references you cite should have those capabilities / technology / resources – but I consider this being so widespread because it's already widely used, designers/marketers like it (look ma – it moves!), and non-enterprise companies don't have the c/t/a to do something better.
Without that data / technology / resources – you are either going to have one promotion on the homepage regardless of user – or, a collection of them – hoping that one of them might speak to the visitor. What the rotating banner does bring to the table (in its defense) is the ability to speak to a wider audience without sacrificing real estate in the hopes that it is "personalized" for the visitor even if but for a few brief moments. I think you make a valid point is that a personalized single promotion would be more effective, but in lieu of that, the rotating banner can serve a purpose given a proper, usable implementation.
I'm not saying it's god's gifts to homepages, but I wouldn't characterize it as a "scourge" either – more of a stop-gap to reach/personalize to different audiences without consuming too much real estate. I'd like to see this rotating homepage go head to head though with something like the GPS central case study layout though =)
November 14th, 2011 at 12:17 pm
I agree with you that personalization could be a solution but it's rarely possible to do well on a public home page.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Kevin.
I'm actually not suggesting removing important product promotions. They can be included without using a rotating offer! Many of our clients have a very wide breadth of products and services that we can fit onto the home page without compromising results.
I am definitely recommending carefully considering whether a message needs to be on the home page, though. There are often messages in the mix that are more important internally than to your visitors.
I recommend a two-pronged solution:
1. Reduce the content with more careful criteria for inclusion
2. Use layouts that avoid animation and auto-rotation
November 18th, 2011 at 6:07 am
Thanks for this post. I'm in the midst of planning a redesign on my own site and frankly I was planning to use a rotating banner, mostly because the sites I like use them. Good to hear an opposing view.
November 18th, 2011 at 9:01 am
Anything worth doing is worth testing, Andrew!
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[...] test after test, this little bit of interactivity has shown to reduce conversion rates. Yet it is used on websites all across the Web. This simply means that [...]
April 4th, 2012 at 9:11 pm
[...] test after test, this little bit of interactivity has shown to reduce conversion rates. Yet it is used on websites all across the Web. This simply means that [...]
April 4th, 2012 at 11:15 pm
[...] test after test, this little bit of interactivity has shown to reduce conversion rates. Yet it is used on websites all across the Web. This simply means that [...]