Why You Should Carefully Select Your Website Artwork

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Oct 9, 2007

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I was searching for live chat software to integrate into one of our websites when I found the LiveHuman.com website. The photo on their home page reminded me that it's important to test your landing page designs, including photo selections, with real users before launching ad campaigns.

I'm looking for text, not voice, chat software that works like typical instant messaging apps such as Yahoo Instant Messenger or Google Talk. When I clicked LiveHuman.com's ad in my Google search results page (SRP), I hit their home page and almost immediately clicked back to the SRP. I didn't think much about it at first, but a few clicks later I landed on a page that reviewed several text chat clients, and LiveHuman.com was one of the services in the review. It was at that point that I realized why I'd so quickly bounced off the LiveHuman.com home page and why it's worth blogging about.

Whoever chose the graphic for this home page (which was also the ad's landing page) was probably searching stock photo collections using terms like "operator" or "customer support", which would yield pictures of smiling men & women on the telephone. Normally, that's the type of pic that you'd expect to see on a customer support website and that's what the designer chose here:

Text chat operators use keyboards, not phone headsets

The problem in this instance is that I was specifically looking for a text chat application, not voice chat software. So when I clicked through and this page loaded, I mentally processed this page and made a bounce decision in about three seconds based on this criteria:

1. The first photo I saw was of a woman wearing a voice chat/telephone headset
2. Nowhere in the headlines or bullets is the phrase "text chat" used
3. The second photo I saw was of a man wearing a voice chat/telephone headset
4. I remembered that there were at least 10 ads and several relevant search results on the SRP that were just a click away

Those four factors triggered an immediate bounce from this landing page. LiveHuman.com paid for my click (it was a Google Adwords ad) and also would have potentially lost a lead and possible sale all due to choosing a photo for their landing page that caused me to misunderstand their product.

Perhaps I'm just an oddball and the other 99 out of 100 visitors to their site would interpret the photo differently. But on the off chance that there are other people like me, I'm curious to see if their conversion rates would change at all by substituting a different set of pictures on their home page.