How Photos Impact Conversion: It’s Time to Go Deeper

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If you were trying to convince somebody to travel to Venice, would you do this?

Of course not.

You’d probably do this.

The travel industry knows visuals matter. But a pretty image is about as far as most companies go when considering how images impact conversion.

500px is a photography community and marketplace that has collected billions of data points on how different people react to different types of imagery, which it shares with brands to help them choose images that will lift. The company recently created an online travel agency to test how images impact conversion within the travel industry.

Caption: Primary landing page for 500px’s OTA sitting on a sub-domain at places.500px.com.

500px selected a mix of places that included top destinations and amazing imagery. The company then built landing pages for each accompanied by content and a button reading, “Take me there now.”

Key findings

• Featuring people in images can increase conversion, but other factors play a role as well. For Havana, pictures with people had twice the conversions. But, for images of nature — waterfalls, mountains, and beaches — photos with people actually performed flat or worse.
• Nature landscapes without (young) people featured are 22% more engaging for viewers 35 years or older.
• The top destinations still performed well, but with high-quality photos, the conversion rates of other destinations got close. The percentage of people who clicked on the top destinations from the main page was roughly 7%, but others, like Austria and Slovenia, were at 6%.
• 360-degree photography increased time on site by 34%. Some users even broke the two minute mark.

Image analytics is imperative. Travel brands must use the full power of imagery to drive conversion. 500px is working to build a better set of wings that can launch travel companies into the new age of imagery that converts.

For more information on how to use image analytics to optimize your conversion, visit 500px here.