When a visitor tries to access outdated content at your website—say, through an old bookmark—she'll land on a 404 page that explains that the page no longer exists. Most companies use these pages to steer users back to a site's active content.

The 404 page at Mountain Equipment Co-op, for instance, offered a text-heavy site map, with links for everything from shipping information to FAQs to employment opportunities. But the company wanted to do a better job of keeping visitors at its website and decided to test something different.

It created an alternate 404 page dominated by the image of a lost hiker reading a map amid open fields and a big blue sky. The new page gave a brief rundown of possible reasons for the error, a search box for keywords and a pull-down menu for continued browsing.

The switch produced great results—but not in the way Mountain Equipment Co-op had anticipated.

"[A]lthough both 404 pages 'converted' roughly the same amount of continued site shopping," notes Ann Holland at the Which Test Won blog, "the shoppers who'd seen the big image wound up spending about 73.62% more money than those who hadn't." For Mountain Equipment Co-op, that translated into thousands of dollars of additional sales.

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