How Fast Moving Elements Affect Your Calls-to-Action

The Ultimate Conversion Webpage Review webinar series reviewed several websites to show where owners go wrong in their conversion optimization efforts.This webinar involved a review of a number of websites which is why it was broken down into so many parts. Each part represents an individual website along the issues that were highlighted in each website, plus probable solutions to optimize conversion, by carrying out a series of tests on different elements of each site’s pages.

In this webinar, Convert teamed up with Bobby Hewitt of Creative Thirst to review a number of things many websites do wrong which ends up hurting their conversion rates. While conversion rate optimization is one of the best ways to increase profits, not knowing how to use it can actually keep you from making the most of your business. For the complete webinar series, you can watch its entirety here.

Elements Hurting Your Optimization Efforts

AppWards was the next site to go under review. Appwards is a dutch company that provides IT services. We took a look at their website, and just like many of the sites that we looked at, there seems to be a lot of useless elements in their webpage such as:

• Movement of multiple elements
• Banners with no buttons to click on
• Rotating banners
• Poor call-to-action

The site has rotating banner that doesn’t match with any meaningful calls to action. It’s something that seems to be plaguing many websites, at least the ones that were evaluated. The speed used on the banner is an issue that should be tested, since one is forced to click back to finish reading. AppWards also has a banner with no buttons to click on. It just scrolls through at its own pace – a rather fast one at that – with the assumption that everyone is a fast reader and they can read through everything before it quickly changes to something else. On top of that, a poor call to action and lack of clickable buttons.

[Tweet “The CTA is the most important feature of a page. After all, you want your user to do something, which is always supported by the call-to-action.”]

Tone it Down

The impression seems to be to get visitors to sign up for an award or attend some event, and this seems to be competing for attention with a number of sponsors on the right side also asking the same. They are also dynamic – move to the top – and there also seems to be a color conflict. One thing that can help matters in such a case is getting the sponsors and graying them out so that all the color levels are visually equal. They need not be rotated and if they could remain static, even better.

The rotation is not mandatory and one needs to make a choice between rotating the background image that is distracting and the sponsors.  According to an article – Rotating Banners: Why Image Sliders Kill Conversions – by Tim Ash,

Since anyone browsing online is constantly besieged with advertising, users develop filters, attempting to avoid anything that resembles an ad. Movement that distracts them from the content they’re trying to access comes across as an ad, and they consciously try to ignore it.

If you had the luxury of not rotating anything at all, then it would be best if nothing is rotated. This would lay the focus on more important calls to action like for instance, the top of the banner, which can be used to portray a more compelling message, like why one should bother entering the awards or attending them altogether.

The movement of multiple elements is very distracting because some important messages are lost in the thick of things. An example includes the very important social proof at the top of the page that illustrates how many days are actually left to join the awards. This is a great message but one that is lost nevertheless, because it’s not visible enough due to the low visual weight that is caused by the competition of too many moving elements.

Conversion optimization is hurt in cases where multiple elements are crying for attention – and made worse by many moving objects – which overshadows the important call to actions that could otherwise increase conversion. For the complete webinar series, you can watch its entirety here