
There is has been a lot of conversation recently on the “twittersphere” about feature carousels and how much we either love them or hate them. Personally I am pretty neutral, when done right, they can be a useful part of a companies web presence.
But what does it mean “Done Right?” In a recently informal study presented by Erik Runyon at http://weedygarden.net/2013/01/carousel-stats/ he presents an argument against using them because the majority of the clicks were for the first item on the ND.edu website:
Regarding “Static” Carousels:
“Approximately 1% of visitors click on a feature. There was a total of 28,928 clicks on features for this time period.”
This is 84% of the 1% for a Static Carousel. A static carousel? I guess this means that the visitor needs to click on the carousel to move it to the next item, and then click again and again. It’s fairly obvious to assume just based upon the number of interactions required that the first item will get clicked on the most and the others will not.
Regarding Auto-forwarding Carousels:
“This site averaged the highest number of clicks with 8.8% of homepage visitors clicking a feature.”
This is a huge difference in the number of visitors clicking on the features. By using an Auto-forwarding feature Carousel there was an 8.8x increase in click-through percentage. This is NOT an insignificant finding!
“Finally, I’d suggest that the subject matter can make a big difference.”
Of course it can, and it did in the data he presented.
Several of our clients have told us that their marketing groups are always fighting for the first slot in an auto-forwarding carousel. The subject matter for the first slots at ND.edu were sports related. Sports at Notre Dame University are very popular. Its kind of like having a link that says, “Click here to see Kate Upton Naked.” I bet a lot of people would click on that link.
The reason that users hate feature carousels is that they work. The human perceptual system is designed to automatically attenuate towards movement and change. Auto-forwarding Carousels grab attention away from what visitors are reading and towards the marketing message that your company is trying to present them with.
I’d like to see a study that uses a random order placement of the content in order to control for the order effect. My guess is that when this is done the second item will be the most selected. Why? Does Pavlov ring a bell? See http://wp.me/p27Bf1-1J