CTR and conversion rates are two of the most important metrics you should be measuring for your business. They’re both about getting users onto your website and then getting them to make a purchase — both having a different impact on revenue.
The images your brand uses affect your CTR and conversion rates and that means they have a profound effect on the success of your company. So don’t just publish any old images on your website, blog, or ads — really think about what you are doing.
Below I’ve looked at how images affect your CTR and conversion rates, along with some other concurrent success factors.
Recommended reading: Improve your conversion rate and increase revenue with these user experience design essentials
How big an impact do images have?
Your CTR (click-through-rate) measures how many people have clicked through to your site, and your conversion rate reflects how many of your site visitors have completed an action. Both are extremely important to your business.
These two metrics help to show just how successful you are at turning people who are interested in your business and your products into paying customers. A number of studies have shown that images have a massive impact on both your CTR and conversion rates.
This is for a range of reasons…
Just including an image improves your CTR
Email marketing brand Vero ran a series of email marketing campaigns to check the impact images have on CTR. Using the figures from more than 5,000 campaigns, Vero established that your CTR is on average automatically 42% higher if it has an image.
Using the right images drives up your conversion rate
An A/B test by VWO assessed the impact of different images on a website’s conversion rate. Using the stats of more than 11,000 visitors for two versions of a single landing page, VWO established that making tweaks to the images you use on your site can improve your global conversion rates by 40.18%.
A white background for your images improves CTR
Microsoft carried out a test to see what how having a white background for their product images affected the company’s CTR. Testing it out using email marketing, Microsoft found that using a white background increased its CTR by 325%.
How to improve the effectiveness of your images
In addition to using images in the first place, selecting the right images, and using the correct background, there are a number of things that your business can do in order to improve the CTR and conversion rate for your images.
Tap into the emotions of your users
People are driven by their emotions. As a result, the buying habits of your customers can be altered by triggering their emotions — images are a way for your business to tap into this.
Using the desired outcome technique (a trigger that shows your user what their life will look like once they have the solution you are offering) is one way of using emotions in images to improve your conversion rate. By employing this tactic you could improve your conversion rate by up to 550%.
Use high quality images
Using low quality images on your site will turn your readers off, damage your conversion rates, and lose your business money. In today’s visual world, there is no excuse for poor images — with so many free image sites out there, even the most bootstrapped of startups can afford to invest in good photography.
Make sure that when you add images to your site that they are at a 72dpi, as this gives them the cleanest resolution and makes it as easy as possible for your users to see them.
Just make sure that you compress any images on your site so that they don’t slow it down. Slow loading speeds also have an adverse effect on conversion rates.
Humanize your images
One of the most impressive boosts that you can bring to your business’s conversion rate comes from adding more human faces to the images you use.
This is a tactic that was employed by online art seller, Medalia Art. The result of Medalia Art humanizing its images was incredible, with the company’s conversion rate increasing by an enormous 95%.
Improving your images isn’t the only thing that can help
While images have a huge impact on both your CTR and conversion rate, they aren’t the only things potentially holding you back. Boost your conversion rates and get people clicking through to your brand with the following tips:
Use interstitial advertising
An interstitial ad is a fullscreen landing page that covers a full web page and appears during natural transition points of your users’ web usage. These differ from a banner ad which covers only part of the screen.
Interstitial advertising is one of the most popular ad methods used by businesses to improve revenue, as it is known to have a huge average CTR.
Make sure you have a good search function
Amazon is the biggest online business in the world and has one of the most impressive conversion rates of any brand on the planet. One of the major reasons for this is that it has a search function that is simple to use.
If you want to convert your users into customers then you need to follow Amazon’s lead and make it easy for them to find what they want by having a search function that does just that. You’ll find a number of helpful tips for how to improve your search function by reading this brilliant article.
Improve your meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are the sales copy that appear underneath your page titles in SERPs. After your page title, it is the first thing that your users see of your web pages.Your meta descriptions are an important CTR factor for your business because they are the main sales copy to convince your users that your website can provide them with what they want.
Your CTR and conversion rates have a huge impact on the success of your business and images have a massive impact on these two metrics. Apply the advice of this article and you’ll ensure that you don’t make any rookie mistakes with your image
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by guest blogger Patrick Foster
Patrick Foster is a writer and ecommerce expert from Ecommerce Tips — an industry-leading ecommerce blog dedicated to sharing business, entrepreneurial insights, and actionable tips to help your business. Check out the latest news on Twitter @myecommercetips.
