Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This post was originally published on the Tatum Marketing blog May 6, 2009

If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you probably know that Flash is not my favorite homepage element. There’s plenty of evidence to show that it’s a bad idea for several reasons.

• Most website visitors don’t read Flash messages.
• The motion distracts visitors from other – more important – elements on your page.
• Business-to-business website users tell researchers they hate it.

But does it drive visitors away from your site? Maybe not.

We’re currently running an experiment with a technical software client. The company has a not-awful bounce rate of 40%, and we’re working to improve it further. Their homepage Flash image is one of the best I’ve seen. It actually shows what the product does – as opposed to most homepage flash sequences that just send pictures and words zooming across the page.

Still, Flash is annoying, right?

We decided to run an experiment to find out how much the bounce rate would improve if we eliminated the flash. The client actually came up with 4 versions to test against the original.

1. No animation at all.
2. Animation cycles once and then stops.
3. Animation pauses 30 seconds between cycles.
4. Animation cycles faster.

While the results are not yet conclusive, we’re seeing an interesting trend. Surprisingly (to me), the animation with the faster cycle appears to be winning. We’ve seen a reduction in bounce rate as high as 15% in this mode. The one with no animation is showing very little improvement – less than 1%.

Can we conclude from this experiment that Flash is actually a good thing? No. It appears to be working for this client, but it may not work for you. Even with this client, more testing is required before we could say that the Flash is good.

The point is it’s time to stop assuming we know what works and what hurts. It’s time to test our assumptions and let prospects tell us what they like and don’t like. Such testing is so easy to do these days even the smallest of marketers can test.

And I just might have to rethink my position on Flash. At least maybe I’ll stop automatically hating it.

I’ll let you know later which version ultimately wins in this experiment.