Link Color & Click-through Rate - Text Links
Purpose:
Every click counts when you own a website. Even one or two extra clicks per month could be very significant to a business owner. This experiment tests whether or not the color of a link affects the amount of clicks it receives.
The Experiment:
Click data was tracked on a popular tutorial website. A set of text links on the left sidebar was programmed to rotate through the following five colors:
- Blue; hex: #0000FF; R:0 G:0 B:255
- Purple; hex: #932364; R:147 G:35 B:100
- Red; hex: #C30D0B; R:195 G:13 B:11
- Green; hex: #30AD35; R:48 G:173 B:53
- Orange; hex: #D45704; R:212 G:87 B:4
Results:
Results were gathered from 700 unique clicks.
Conclusions:
Link color does not appear to have a substantial effect on clickthrough rate, as the distribution of clicks was fairly even. However, links that were blue or green did tend to have a slightly lower clickthrough rate.
It is interesting to note the low performance of blue links. A blue link may be overlooked because of it's frequent use. In the same way that "banner blindness" occurs, the classic blue link may now have less effect than it has historically had, simply because of its status as the standard link color.