Nice experiment. Do you have any insight whether this is due to the design being inherently superior, or if it is just the fact that users are familiar with the design due to it being a 1:1 clone of Google?
At our company, we've found that a cohesive design throughout a funnel will always* drive better results. If you think about google as a step in your funnel, then you'll be improving conversion through that same principle.
Also, you've guaranteed familiarity by using Google to buy users. It might be interested to buy users via Bing or Yahoo or something, to see if that same design wins.
But, that's purely gravy. You've probably hit a pretty good balance of testing and results with your experiment already.
Next question: Would it improve your success rate to have multiple versions of your site that echo the designs of the sites that drive most of your traffic, and automatically direct users to the version that matches their referrer?
There's probably more overhead involved than could ever be worthwhile, but now I'm curious.
When we rolled out hover2 in production it looked significantly different from Google, so we were concerned that we might lose the lift. But we didn't. So we chalked the lift up to the hover UX paradigm rather than the visual similarity to Google.
Cool, thanks for the info and the reply. I think there may be something to that type of design for comparing locations vs listings, it is similar to what sites like airbnb use. I generally like to think that those types of sites have done the testing already and came to that design (or stuck with it) for a reason.
