This week I embarked on an experiment to try and see if I could improve the number of people clicking on the ‘Zoom Image’ link that features underneath all product images on the product details page on the JJB Sports website.
The Zoom link is a very common feature on ecommerce sites therefore, you’d expect it to be highly used by the general public. I monitor everything on site with Google Analytics and I can tell you that less than 0.5% of people on the JJB site either click the zoom image text link below the image or the click the actual image.
This is heartbreaking on many levels:
- We don’t have room to offer a bigger image than 205*205 pixels for our main product image due to the design so our enlarged/zoomed image usually is much bigger and contains different angled shots of the product in question.
- We use the JavaScript lightboxing technique which I believe is better than using pop-up windows for usability/accessibility and looks damn fine also.
The experiment
I decided to experiment with the wording of the text links: some categories’ products had one wording whilst others had another, all the while I checked the number of clicks each wording was getting.
Image link vs text link
The first result shows that 64% of people who ‘zoom image’ click on the text link (regardless of it’s wording) and 36% click on the actual image. It’d be interesting to see if the same number of people would click on the image if the text link wasn’t visible.
Zoom Image text link wording
| Link Wording | Clicks | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total | 358 | ||
| 1 | Zoom Image | 114 | 32 |
| 2 | Zoom Larger Image | 90 | 25 |
| 3 | View Bigger Image | 61 | 17 |
| 4 | Zoom Picture | 37 | 10 |
| 5 | View Enhanced Image | 36 | 10 |
| 6 | Click for big image | 15 | 4 |
| 7 | Zoom | 4 | 1 |
Summary
This is not fully conclusive as some categories get far more traffic than others so another technique I’ll be testing will be to swap around the wording with the same products on different days of the week. If the results hold out next week then it will give conclusive proof which wording is best.
Other experiments
Even though I’m striving for the optimum link text wording, I’m very aware that it won’t make much difference and maybe how the link looks or where the link appears may have to be experimented with in the future too.