Just How Much Can “Security” Seals Increase Conversions?

Increase conversion rates

In marketing, particularly digital marketing trust is a HUGE factor in the majority of buying decisions.  If a potential customer doesn’t trust the site they are less likely to enter their information, sensitive information, to make a purchase.

Today we are going to look at a particular case study that addresses relaying the security and trust of a purchase process in the form of “security” seals.

Just How Much Can “Security” Seals Increase Conversions?

Security seals come in many fashions.  There are tons of companies out there from your SSL certificate provider to third-party “trust” seals.

In this particular case, we are testing two on an order page in the form of a third party “Trust Guard” and McAfee security from the SSL certificate used by this company.

This particular company has several product options to choose from and has a fairly complex order process.  So in an effort to increase the checkouts, we tested these “security” elements on both desktop and mobile to see just how much impact they have on the buying decision.

Once you make your selection and are shown the order total we tested the original (below) vs adding these two “seals”.
leorig
And the variation with the seals added.

leseals_censored
As you can see not much changed other than the two images.

We could assume that by adding these elements that it would increase the level of trust and increase the results.  We have proven that trust elements can increase results in other tests, but as good little optimizers, we always test and never just assume it will show an increase.

As mentioned we tested this on both desktop and mobile.  First, let’s take a look at the desktop results.
ledesktopresults
These results are after about 2000 unique visitors total on the test and the results haven’t really fluctuated at all since the test began.

The top result is measuring “checkouts” and as you can see we are showing a 19.2% increase in orders by having the seals present.  The second result is showing the impact the seals have on orders by “new customers” and as you can see we are showing a 28.2% increase.  The third is measuring revenue, and by adding the seals are showing a 71.1% increase in revenue per visitor.

Now onto mobile… We know that this company gets more mobile traffic so it is always important to test mobile and desktop separately as the experience and the results will differ, in most cases, by quite a bit.

lemobileresults
Measuring the same elements on the mobile test we can see that with the seals we are showing at 21.2% in successful orders, 28.7% increase in orders by new customers, and 9.3% increase in revenue.

It is always crazy to see that with such a small change you can have a big impact.  The point here is that you need to pay attention to not just testing random things but making your experience on-site a more enjoyable and trustworthy one.

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