This website is hacker safe. Now click the sign-up button.

Last week, my marketing director suggest I look up a product called Hacker Safe by the company ScanAlert. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I loaded up the website. I had seen the “HACKER SAFE!” logo brandished at dozens of websites. Once I realized it the logo was supplied by a third party, I realized that this was less a campaign to make the web a safer place, and more a method of reassuring consumers that their credit card numbers will be safe from the malicious figures hunched over chip-ridden keyboards in dark hidden rooms. But surely a small logo wouldn’t have that much of an effect on a consumer’s likelihood of buying a product?

Ah, how wrong I was. This is a prime example of why it is always good to research these types of products before dismissing them. What ScanAlert does is perform a somewhat routine daily inspection of the client’s web server. As long as everything checks out, they provide a small logo which the client can then place on their website, shopping card, landing page, etc which proudly proclaims their site as being hacker safe.

At the start of my research, I was fairly pessimistic both about how thorough a security check ScanAlert actually does, and how much an effect this logo actually has. I became even more weary when I found out the whole package costs nearly $2000 per year, for what basically seemed to amount to a port scan and 150 pixel image. I combed through forum posts, and found several on Webmaster World. Throughout the post, naysayers laughed at the prospect of people actually paying that much for such a service, though they mostly seemed to question how truly “hacker safe” this would make a server. Yet in between those posts were people who claimed that the placement of this logo actually had a noticeable impact on their conversion rate (conversion rate simply means the percentage of people who arrive on a web page and complete the goal that would make them a consumer, such as purchasing a product or signing up for an email list).

So slowly, the techie in me dwindled, as the newfound marketing side of me had had his interested piqued. Could a simple logo really increase sales by 5, 10, 20, even 35% as claimed through ScanAlert’s site? It seemed that might be true, both from the official testimonials as well as as nearly a dozen separate forum posts seemed to claim.

The question was, assuming a lowly 5% increase in our conversion rate, would the cost be worth it when compared to how much an extra 5% subscribers via Google’s PPC? Turns out yes, by tens of thousands of dollars (unfortunately I can’t get into specifics here, but I was stunned when I ran the numbers).

In the end I gave a strong recommendation to my boss, and we ended up purchasing Hacker Safe for three of our sites. Unfortunately, it’s going to be a little tricky to track as we can’t do a true A/B test on our main sites. However, we’ve already noticed a spike of orders over the weekend, and while we can’t directly attribute those orders to the placement of this logo, I wouldn’t be too surprised if that was the cause.