HackerSafe & The Power of Trust

I am often asked by people what sorts of items I would recommend testing on a landing page. There are no universal truths and your mileage may vary. However, there are common themes that work well across a range of industries. One of these is the use of trust and credibility indicators. These reduce anxiety for your visitors and increase their confidence when interacting with your landing page.

A common type trust and credibility indicator are various safe shopping seals. The leader in this area is McAfee’s HackerSafe trustmark. In most cases, adding the trustmark to your website will increase conversion rates by several percentage points. But just adding the trustmark to your page is not enough. You also need to consider which version of the trustmark to use (they come in several shapes and colors), and where on your page it will appear. Many companies mistakenly put their trustmark “below the fold” on their page. By doing this they make the trustmark invisible and practically useless. We always suggest putting the trustmark prominently near the top of the page.

But even this is not enough. The specific location within the page header can result in additional improvements. In a recent test we tested different positions and trustmark versions on the LuggagePoint website and were able to find an 11% increase in revenue per visitor and a 5% increase in conversion rate simply by changing the position of the trustmark in the header.

Read the LuggagePoint case study here.

As a McAfee HackerSafe partner SiteTuners.com will run a free multivariate test on any site with certain minimum traffic levels to determine which placement on the page (out of 4 possible positions) and HackerSafe trustmark image (out of 6 possible versions) results in the best performance.