Choose the Most Popular Trust Seals

Today we got a great reminder on how simple a test can be having great impacts on Ecommerce conversion rates and revenue per visitor from an article on the CrazyEgg blog. Which of the 20 most popular seals would you trust? This is not exact science and obvious less reliable in comparison to an A/B test, but it gives you a good indicator of what seals you can pick for your A/B test. Lets see which were the “winners”?

The top 5 most recognized and trusted seals that where mentioned in this article on the CrazyEgg blog where:

1. Norton (35.6%)
2. McAfee (22.9%)
3. TRUSTe (13.2%
4. BBB (13.2%)
5. Thawte (6%)

This is in line what we see in our A/B testing platform. These are the most popular seals that are being tested, from what I remember (and that is also no science… just intuition combined with bad memory). Marie Dean the author of the article works for Conversion Lifters  quotes a research by Baymard Institute conducted a survey in which they asked shoppers which seals generated the greatest sense of trust when shopping online. Here are some facts from that survey (of 2013).

Trust Seal vs SSL

Funny is that while some seals connect to a SSL security level, the “winner” of the survey is giving an SSL certificate connected to the seal while others are nothing more than a logo with a service backing it. Baymard Insitute also says:

It’s the feeling it’s not the actual security of your page that matters the most to users as they have little to no technical understanding of TLS/SSL encryption or even how forms are submitted. Rather it is the perceived security that’s of importance to this vast majority of users. This is why we included both SSL seals (Norton, Thawte, Trustwave, Geotrust, Comodo) and trust seals (McAfee, BBB Accredited, TRUSTe) in the survey. What we wanted to test is which site seal makes the user feel the most secure, not which seal actually represents the strictest technical / security compliance.

Visual Recognition Gives Trust

When 2,510 responses were asked which seal gave them the most reassurance, as you can see by the red hot spots below Verisign was one of the most clicked seals. The survey received 1,286 responses on actual seals, the remaining chose “Don’t know or no preference” and ran from January 9-11th, 2013. All the respondents were adults from the US. The survey was conducted using Google Consumer Surveys. During testing, five answer options were displayed concurrently and their order was randomized to avoid position bias. Each answer was shown an equal amount of times within a +-1.83% margin except for the “Don’t know or no preference” answer which was always displayed and positioned as the fifth and last option. The results you can find below in the click-map.

Conclusions

There are some insights from this, but it must be clear that trust seals most of the times when placed on the checkout page increase conversions. We have seen a lot of evidence of that from clients of our A/B testing software” href=”https://www.convert.com”>A/B testing software. But even though it’s true that the top 5 most of the times win, we have seen very different A/B test results as well where the last 10 of this make a bigger impact (this case study comes to mind)

• If you just want a single site seal try testing Norton first.
• 49% don’t know or no preference when asked, so for sure test before replacing any seal