We were recently debating which video to feature first on a website we’re building, and after a quick talk we decided to put the one starring the hot girl first. It was almost a no brainer. We’ve all heard that beautiful women sell stuff. Car salesmen have been using this technique since the dawn of time. But I got to thinking, does anyone know if this translates to the online world? Turns out not so much.

Last week I spent some quality time with Google searching for studies and statistics that prove pictures of attractive women on websites increase traffic and conversions. I got a lot of search results when I googled “attractive women,” but no matter how much context I added to the search all I got were results for dating sites. So I gave up. Then, lo and behold, Marketing Sherpa (which is a great resource if you are interested in optimizing your online marketing) posted this article, which reveals two very interesting things about the hot girl theory.

First, a business-to-business marketer tested featuring an attractive woman vs. an attractive man in an email campaign targeted to a group of mostly male, over 40 insurance agents. Despite all internal bets to the contrary, the male image had 53% more clicks than the female.

The second interesting finding is that the viewers did look at the attractive woman. Marketing Sherpa did a landing/conversion page study that used eye tracking to see where the executive-types were looking. Sure enough, the faces of the attractive woman drew more attention than the face of the man (no matter if the test subject was male or female). Anne Holland, Marketing Sherpa's Content Director, surmises that this attention actually distracts the user from the desired action – to click on links, read promotions, and so on. The male face drew less attention so wasn’t as much of a distraction for both men and women, leaving them to explore the other content on the website.

This brings up another point: not all attention is good attention when it comes to optimizing your webpage or email campaign. I’ll write more on that topic another day.