Verisign recently published a study demonstrating that the “trust index” of your average web visitor is at a paltry 61.5 points out of a possible 100.
In other words, your average web visitor is extremely wary and rates the overall trust worthiness of unfamiliar websites just above an “F”.
It’s for this reason that many security & trust logos exist – they’re designed to bring outside credibility and reinforce that a new user can trust your website.
Most of the big players in the trust logo space offer a litany of studies demonstrating how simply adding their logo will improve your website conversion rate.
We’ve found, however, that proper placement of your trust logo can make a significant difference in how much the conversion rate will improve.
Many websites tend to place their trust symbols in two places:
- At the top of the page
- Under or next to their checkout form
SportChalet.com, for instance, places their trust images on the very bottom of their checkout form:
We’ve found, however, that placing your trust logo next to the most critical fields in your process can outperform placement anywhere else.
For example, on a recent project our client needed to collect both Social Security & Driver’s License information from their users.
Rather than leaving the symbol at the top of the page where it was originally placed, we moved the symbol closer to the crucial fields:
This simple, intuitive change led to nearly a 9% gain in the form’s conversion rate!
In the project referenced above, we increased the overall conversion rate by more than 65% using this trick and a variety of others, so make sure to contact us today if you’d like to drastically improve your conversion rate.
Our advice to SportChalet.com and other ecommerce sites would be to test their security symbols next to the user’s credit card information field to address the user’s fears at the point of transaction.
The bottom line is if you’ve spent the money on a security symbol, test the placement to drive substantially better results!
P.S. – Contact us today to increase your conversion rate . . .
We work on a performance basis and charge nothing up front.
If you want to drastically improve your conversion rate contact us today.
A small conversion tip: don’t hit vistors over the head about a subscription while they’re still in the middle of reading what you have to say.
Ed,
We’ll share some data in a future blog-post about how that experiment worked, but ultimately we agree and will be taking the newsletter subscription down – we appreciate your comment.
Zack
Seconded. But I’ll probably sign up after I’m finished anyway…
Great “placement” tip. Thanks for sharing it.
Hi Doug – Yes, they can get expensive. If you have a SSL certificate on your site (looks like you do have one from StartCom) you can usually get some kind of seal from your SSL provider. If not, there are other competitors to Verisign that may be more affordable. Hope that helps!
You are right about the importance of correct placement of a Trust Seal. Many website shoppers don’t consider security until they are asked for their credit card details – so one important place to reinforce trustworthiness is at the credit card detail stage.
One website saw a significant 28% increase in sales over an 8 week period (confirmed by A/B split testing) https://trust-verified.org/case-study-c/