Hello my nerdy friends,
This one could be super useful if you want to increase sales in an ecom store with multiple products.
The study:
Researchers ran a test on a wedding vendor website to see how “broad” options compared to “narrow” options (which they defined as big cities and small cities).
They ranked vendors by clicks and showed people which ones were popular.
Then they tracked what people clicked over two months. (Tucker et al., 2011)
🧪What they found:
People clicked “narrow” options more than the broad options when both were shown as popular.
Why?
People seemed to use popularity as a clue for quality.
Imagine you land on a website selling marketing courses.
One option is broad: “Online Marketing Course.” The other is more niche: “Facebook Ads for Ecom Brands.”
You see that the FB ads course has almost the same amount of reviews as the broad marketing course.
That would likely intrigue you and make you think: “Wow! That course must be really good if it has the same number reviews as the broad one, even though less people are interested in it”.
The paper explains this as quality inference. When people saw a narrow option with the same popularity as a broader option, they seemed to think the narrow option must be really good if so many people choose it, despite it not having a wide appeal.
Caveat
This study measured clicks, not purchases.
💡Takeaway
If your page gives people a few options, test a “Most popular”/”Bestseller” tag or another way to show popularity on the more niche option.
See you next week,
Ksenia
P.S. Thank you to today’s awesome sponsor, The Marketing Millennials!
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