Improve Profits By Changing Background Color
by James D. Brausch
http://www.glyphius.com
Many copywriters teach the "sales letter" concept. In
other words, write a sales letter on a virtual piece of
paper and make that your own page web-site. That seems
to be good advice. The thing that bothers me is the area
surrounding the virtual piece of paper... the so-called
virtual desktop. What color should it be?
I keep seeing different colors for major marketers. I
even see some major marketers switch colors from one site
to another. It makes me wonder if they have done any
testing. Does the color just not matter? If so, why do
so many use dark blue, light blue and black?
Then I consider the major money makers on the 'net and
wonder why only one uses a colored background. I'm
talking about Yahoo, Google, Ebay and Amazon. They all
use a white background surrounding their "page" that is
set in a limited width table in the center of the page.
Only MSN.com uses a medium blue background.
It was high time for a study to find out the real answer.
I did it in the usual way. I built a list of profitable
and unprofitable sites by looking at the duration of ads
being placed on Yahoo (Overture) and Google. If an ad
had been shown for six months or longer, I placed the
target page on a list of "profitable" sites. If an ad
was placed and completely dropped in less that one month,
the site was placed on an "unprofitable" list. The
latter list would be less reliable, but the comparison
between the two lists would still be statistically valid
with a sufficient sample size. The latter list might
only represent "average" sites, but even "average" sites
would be less profitable than the known profitable list.
The results were very mixed. First of all, the white
background sites were the vast majority on both lists.
You simply can't go wrong with a completely white
background. However, it wasn't actually the winner.
Here is the breakdown:
Profitable sites with a white background: 85.2%
Unprofitable (or average) sites with a white
background: 92.6%
A non-white background actually was more profitable a
higher percentage of the time. I then studied the
"darkness" of the background in those minority sites for
both profitable and unprofitable sites. Looking at the
RGB values, I split the colors into two buckets... those
that were dark (191 or less average RGB value) and
those that were light (192 or higher RGB value). The
results were even more clear:
Looking only at non-white backgrounds of profitable
sites with dark colors: 92.8%
Looking only at non-white backgrounds of unprofitable
sites with light colors: 96.1%
Wow! That's quite a correlation. Although a vast
majority of profitable (and unprofitable) sites have a
white background, those that do have a non-white
background have a dark background whereas the
unprofitable sites were more likely to have a light
background... both with an extremly high correlation.
That's hard to ignore.
I next had to get the actual answer. What color
background had the highest correlation with profitability.
What's the bottom line? The answer was just as clear:
53.3% of the profitable sites with non-white desktop
background were black.
Now; I should be very clear about this result. The area
under study is NOT the actual web-site text area. We are
NOT talking about having white text on a black background.
In a vast majority of cases, these sites actually had
black text on a white background. The area under study is
the theoretical area AROUND the virtual piece of paper.
It is the "desktop" color if you pretend the web-site area
is a piece of paper sitting on a virtual desktop. It
isn't the color of the piece of paper that is under study.
It is the color of the virtual desktop that the piece of
paper is virtually laying upon.
So what am I going to do about this result? I'll probably
eventually implement it. I don't like it, but the result
is very clear. Why don't I like it? Well, take a look at
one of my sites:
http://www.Glyphius.com
I use a virtual piece of white paper on a virtual white
desktop. I like the fuzzed shadow I use around the edges.
That fuzzed shadow won't be possible with a black
background. The shadow will simply disappear leaving (in
my opinion) a less professional look of a crisp piece of
white paper against a black backdrop.
The other reason I don't like it is that it puts me out
of the majority of profitable sites in general. It will
make future studies more difficult. Instead of simply
grabbing profitable sites and comparing them to
unprofitable sites, I will need to grab only profitable
and unprofitable sites that have a black background.
Otherwise other results might not be valid if they come
from the majority white background dataset. A good
example would be a study of headline color. The most
profitable headline color might be different between
those sites with a black background and those with a
standard white background.
One result from this study is very clear though. If
you do choose a non-white background, it is foolhardy
to choose yellow, blue (light or dark), pastel green,
or any other color. The correct color for highest
profitability is clearly black. The 2nd place color
(and the color of the vast majority of sites) is
white. All other colors failed miserably in this
study.
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