How many testimonials?

[scanlin]

Guys, this isn't an SEO question per se, although I suppose the robots could latch on to the words in user testimonial. This is an on-site marketing question:

How many user testimonials are appropriate?

We have a page on our site called 'testimonials' where we display nice emails we've received from happy users. Right now we have about 10 of the best ones displayed, and each one is 30 to 200 words long. The users are not famous people; just regular Joes and we list their name as FirstName + LastInitial. You can see them here.

We have another 10-20 testimonials we could add, and we get new ones about once a week. With your marketing hats on, how many is the right number to have? Is there any problem or negative to having 50? or 100? At some point people will stop reading them, I know. And we do put the best ones at the top (they're not sorted by date, they're sorted by how well we like them).

Any best practices regarding user testimonials? Thanks.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Mike,

From a marketers perspective, I'd say "Putting yourselves in your client's mind, are all these testimonials helping convince me?"

Ultimately, unless you do eye-tracking, or A/B split (or even multivariate) testing on this to see what count leads to the highest conversion rate, there's no fixed answer because every site, every user base and every market is unique.  Heck, you could even consider the argument that it's better to have one or two on sidebars on every page rather than all on one page (as yet one more thing to test with).

[BlinkWeb]

Hi Mike,

First of all, you left out the : in your link so it is broken.

I am curious, does this page get much traffic? Not from an SEO standpoint or even as an entrance page on your site. I mean does it get visits through out the regular navigation of your site compared to other pages on the site? Do people click on it while looking at other content in your site?

Personally am not a fan of testimonials pages being a page on their own, or at least only existing as a page on their own. I don't think people navigate to them or read them when they do. I guess it doesn't hurt to keep them up but I find they are much more effective when used on other pages, especially pages designed to convert.

Check out unbounce.com they do a very good job at templating killer landing pages that use testimonials. Here is a good example. http://unbounce.com/landing-page-templates/#click-through

I would work on adding more call to action language to your free trial page and include some of your better and shorter testimonials on that page. Thats the page you really want to get action on after all. Also I would only offer 1 option for the free trial. 3 is confusing.

Sorry if I didnt really answer your question or kind of went off topic but it all ties in... I think...

[scanlin]

Thanks, Roger. Yea, I used the link tool when composing my message but I don't think it likes https. It expects http (my whole site is https and redirects all http requests to the https version). Bug in the link tool for this forum, I think. Now that I know about it I will post http links.

That's a good question about the traffic to the Testimonials page. I just checked Analytics. If I compare the Features page (which has screen shots and describes the product) with the Testimonials page, I see that the Testimonials page has 54% of the traffic that the Features page has. So it's not as popular as Features, but it still gets meaningful traffic (maybe 1 out 2 people check it out).

I agree that putting some testimonials on the Free Trial page is a great idea. Might increase conversions. Thanks.

There is a reason for having 3 buttons on the free trial page. I want people to mentally commit to one of the 3 pricing plans before they take the free trial. The reason is that once you are logged in I have to pay a real-world money charge to the stock exchanges for each person who has access to the data (even in free trial mode). So I'm not really interested in 20,000 looky-loos who have no intention of signing up for a pay service, because those 20,000 people will cost me money to show them a free trial. I'm proactively weeding out the free-or-I-wont-use-it crowd.

Thanks for the link to unbounce. Looks good and I'm going to go study them now.

Appreciate your help,

MikeS

[KeriMorgret]

Mike, I edited the link in your original question to be http so the link will work, and I'll email the help staff and let them know about this bug.