MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Those of you in the Internet Marketing circles must have come across Alex Mandossian's Marketing with Postcards site. I've always liked Alex's style of setting up landing pages and one element of his Marketing with Postcards page really caught my eye - the flashing red arrow pointing to the sign up form. I wondered if Alex had strategically placed the arrow because he found it impacted signups.

Here's a screenshot of Mandossian's page. Note the red arrow pointing to the signup form.

I decided to test the impact of the flashing red arrow on several landing pages for Adwords traffic from Google.

Here's the footer of the test page:

Just Fill in the Form on the Right to Access the the Website and Receive a Free 55 page Book. It's Free.

I was pretty sure the red arrow would cause visitors to focus more on the sign-up form and stay on the page longer. But I was wrong. The test case is shown below:

In every case, the landing pages without a red arrow outperformed pages with the arrow by a HUGE 10 - 20%. I'm not really sure why. Perhaps the moving red arrow added an aura of sale-y-ness to the site that turned off potential subscribers. Thoughts?

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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