This article originally appeared on Web Profits blog.
Online marketing is a rapidly evolving industry with new trends popping up all the time. Knowing which ones are fads and which ones you should embrace is essential to maximising the performance of your campaigns.
One recent trend in design is the use of animated scrolling on websites and landing pages, where different elements of the page are animated as you scroll.
Rather than just following this trend, I wanted to make sure that it would produce a higher conversion rate, especially because of the additional time, effort and cost required to design with animated scrolling.
What I Tested
BidMyCar offers an innovative way of buying a new car at a big discount. They wanted to generate as many leads as possible for this new service.
To do this, I launched a Google Adwords campaign and designed them a high-converting landing page to drive the traffic to. The landing page was converting well but I wanted to see if I could increase the conversion rate further through the use of animated scrolling.
Control
Our static landing page used high quality design combined with professional sales copywriting to clearly explain the service and prompt visitors to get quotes from dealers.
Variation
To ensure a fair test, I kept the design and copy consistent throughout the page but integrated animated elements as you scrolled.
The Result
There was no significant difference in the conversion rate after running the test for 3 months.
The Lesson
Using animated scrolling because it’s trendy was not worth it for BidMyCar, as there was no significant conversion rate improvement achieved from the additional investment of time, effort and cost in making it animated. This is just one test and whether this result would be found across a range of brands would require a lot more testing to get an overall result.
Even if the conversion rate doesn’t increase, animated scrolling can still have a place in design – it just needs to have a purpose, rather than being a ‘trendy’ addon.
