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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