How photos of people double the conversion

The scientific fact that when looking at a scene or a picture consisting of many different objects, people subconsciously pay attention to human faces is well studied. Even babies and monkeys look at faces longer than other objects.

This was confirmed by two independent experiments.

I analyzed the results of two A / B tests of users of the Visual Website Optimizer website and came to the conclusion that the surest way to attract the attention of visitors is to post human photos on the website.

Interestingly, although both of these tests were carried out independently, they revealed one pattern and led to the same result. This gives me the confidence to say that human photos on the site have something that can increase conversion.
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Let's look at both experiments.

Example one

The guys from Medalia Art sell Brazilian and Caribbean paintings via the Internet. Recently, they were pleasantly surprised when the photos of artists on the main page of the site increased the number of visitors by 90%. This was not their first A / B testing, they had already been “played” with their main page. In the past, they were able to reduce the percentage of failures by 20%, experimenting with the placement of advertising messages.

As is usually done in online stores, the main page displays pictures of the three most famous artists. At this time, without any valid reason, the developers decided to see what would happen if you replace the paintings in the photos of artists. I tried to figure out how they came up with this idea, but the guys claim that it was an absolutely spontaneous decision.

The purpose of this study was to increase the interest of visitors. An interested visitor should click on any link on the main page. Otherwise, his visit was counted as a waiver. The fact of the sale itself was not used as a result of the conversion, because most sales occur after long telephone conversations and trades.

Below I provide screenshots of research options.

The first option with the pictures - the control.


And the second one with photos is the winner.


But the results are in numbers

Option	Conversion	% Improvement
Checklist with pictures	8.8%	----
With photos	17.2%	+ 95%

Obviously, the version with photos of artists led to a much higher conversion than the version with their paintings. In fact, he almost doubled it.

Example two

Jason Thompson's EmptyMind blog is dedicated to web analytics and optimization. In the sidebar of the site is a large phone icon, leading to a page with contact details. Unlike Medalia Art, Jason had a reason to conduct a comparative testing of the icon against the photo.

Having been at the next summit, he received a few comments from different people, that he doesn’t look like his Twitter icon. Then Jason decided that it would be better to use the same photo in all social networks. Checking the photos in the blog was just a continuation of this thought.

In this experiment, the goal was to contact the page, what is the percentage of visitors switched to it. Here are the options and their performance.

Control option


With photo

Option	Conversion	% Improvement
Checklist with phone icon	3.7%	----
With photo	5.5%	+ 48%

Here is what Jason said about these results:
People want an emotional connection with other people. Photography makes this emotional connection easier and, as the experiment proved, brings more people to the page than a faceless icon.

findings

Both experiments independently arrived at the same (statistically significant) conclusion that photographs of people increased conversion. This proves that there is something magical about them.

I recommend that you conduct similar A / B testing to see if a human photo will help your business miraculously.

And if you succeed, then perhaps we have found a great formula for increasing conversion on sites. Good luck!