A/B Split Test: Cartoons VS Photos

for the past 2 years, our movie collector product page has shown a picture of me standing in front of my own dvd collection. similarly, the book collector home had a picture of my wife sytske and her book collection.

but then we had nice cartoon characters created, mainly for use in advertising material. being happy with the results, we thought: let’s use these characters on our product home pages too. it would improve the “after-ad-click” recognition of the visuals and of course, it just looked nice.

so we replaced the photos with the cartoon characters, without split-testing .

recently, while staring at our website, i started wondering: was this really a good idea? the cartoons may look nice but do they really work better than the photos?

so i finally did the a/b split-test: cartoons (a) vs photos (b) .

version a – cartoon characters:

here’s what our movie- and book collector pages look like with the “clz babes”:
pros: it looks nice and creates a strong connection between our banner visuals, the landing page and the software itself (where the clz babes are also used, e.g. in the splash screen).

version b – photos of me and sytske:

these are the same product pages with the collection photos of my wife and me:
pros: recognizable image for collector-types, builds trust because it shows the company owners are collectors too.

the results

well, i was glad i finally came to my senses and did run the a/b split test after all.
because these are the results after 7 days (about 1,500 sign-ups and 300 sales):

compared to version a (cartoons), version b (photos) generated:

• sign ups: 5.1% more
• sales: 35.3% more
• average purchase: 15.6% higher
• total profits: 53.9% higher

is that scary or what? needless to say, i am back to using photos on my landing pages.
but the more important lesson here is: