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The frame and box shadow may also slow the site down. Amazon found that a 100 ms increase in page load time reduces sales by 1%.

Yeah, it's a blunt tool. The next planned test is to 'prettify' the vertical listing and see what happens.

That was my first reaction to this test as well. It's not an A/B test and the conclusions are pretty much worthless.

From experience though, an 'uglier' site getting more clicks is actually fairly common. I've seen the results on 100,000's of visitors across a multitude of landers. The rationalization that seems most common is that people click to 'get away' or get to whatever they want.

Well, they could have done a multivariate test if there was enough traffic to make it statistically significant and tested all combos, like GWO allows.