The Order of Things
Posted On: 2009-10-12
It's Monday again and Steve and I are experiencing some fun times. You see, we're right in the middle of buying a new-for-us car. Do you like that euphemism ... new-for-us? I saw it used the other day when some SEO specialist was talking about buying a car and it was a great way of saying that he wa buying a used car instead of a new car.
Actually I like that saying a lot because there's a certain aura about it that's missing when you admit that you're buying a car that someone else has owned. I don't know why he decided on buying a used car but for us it's all about depreciation. We bought our current car new and it dropped $10k in depreciation in the first year so this time we're not going to shell out a lot of dollars to see it wasted like that. Instead we're going to buy a new-for-us SUV that's got low mileage and we can drive till it falls apart and it won't have cost us heaps of money.
In some ways we're probably quite different to most people who buy things and we're not a marketer's friend because we probably don't respond to a lot of marketing hype but we may be just the same as everyone else when it comes to the order affecting orders. I'm sure lots of marketers knew about this one but perhaps you didn't and I know that I certainly didn't either.
So what am I talking about? I'm talking about the possibility that the way similar items are placed on a sales page may actually have a bearing on which items sell well and which items don't sell so well.
Obviously for us here in adult the order in which different items are placed on a page doesn't have much impact when it comes to selling memberships via free sites and galleries but if those are your only marketing weapons then you're seriously missing out on a lot of sales. While you may need free sites and galleries for traffic when you're starting out in this business it shouldn't be long before you're developing your own traffic sources and when you do that you can always sell more than one sponsor on the same page. That's when the order in which they're placed on a web page may become very important.
While achieving high sales just because an item is placed in a certain spot on a page may sound rather strange a recent study called - Persuasive Recommendation: Serial Position Effects in Knowledge Based Recommender Systems - suggests otherwise.
The study was set up to see if people were more influenced by position of an item on a sales page than by price and you might think that price would win out every time but that was not what the study found.
The test site listed four tents for sale in a horizontal row. The tents had vaguely the same shape but apart from that were quite different to each other. The smallest was 7x7 while the largest was 14x10 and each was shown with a buyer rating that ranged from 3.5 to 4 stars. Two of the tents were described as 5-person tents, one was described as a 4-person tent and one was described as a 3-person tent and there was a range of prices.
So for a moment think about what you would look for if you were shopping for a tent ... what would influence you when it came to deciding which tent to buy and would those same factors influence other people?
Well if you thought that rational thinking was the order of the day when it came to buying those tents you would be wrong. It seems that rational thinking doesn't have all that much to do when it comes to buying anything that appears in a row of similar items.
What does matter is where a particular item appears in that row for the test results showed that even when the most expensive tent appeared at the front of the row more people were more inclined to buy it than they were to buy a cheaper tent that appeared further along the row.
When the order of the tents was changed and a cheaper tent appeared at the head of the row then more people purchased that tent than any other. When the order was changed to put a mid-priced tent at the head of the row sales of that tent exceeded sales of the others.
Whichever tent appeared first in the row of tents that were for sale attracted 2.5 times more buyers than any of the others. It didn't matter what the price was or what the features were, it just mattered whether the tent was at the head of the list or not.
Now whether that ordering effect flows across into adult or not is something you would have to test yourself but if it does then perhaps it's time to have a little play with the order in which you list various sponsors. You may find that if you list the one that pays the most in commissions will sell more than the others if you place it at the head of the list.
But I wouldn't rush in and make major changes to your sites without some testing. In tough time price may still play an important roll in what people will buy when it comes to adult entertainment.