Use of Awards endorsement in web pages

In the past we've included any awards the company or product have attained based upon the assumption that they can only be a positive thing to have on the web page. Well I finally got around to measuring exactly what effect the use of an award logo had when added to a page. Basically I had concluded an earlier optimisation exercise on a landing page using Maxymiser and tweaked the winning page combination to show an award logo instead of the image of two people. I let the adapted test run for 3 weeks and the winning combination fell from a 9.96% uplift to minus 4.05% thus showing that the use of award imagery in this context was ineffective. Click on the image below to enlarge for a summary of what happened.