If everyone responded to ads the exact same way, then you’d see remarkably little variation in the formats and approaches that sites use to expose their visitors to their advertisers’ messages. You could format your ads to look like everyone else’s and stop worrying about it.

However, it’s been clear from YieldBuild’s own testing that each site’s body of visitors has its own preferences and ad sensitivities, and that is often due to the range of different responses among individual visitors. Where visitors came from to visit a site can often give a glimpse to what ad formats they respond to, and which they ignore.

Think about it. Visitors coming from a boisterous social community site with loud, visual ads (think MySpace) might completely ignore subtly-formatted ads. Likewise, visitors from a text-heavy informational site with muted colors (like Craigslist or Digg) might be put off by obtrusive, wildly-contrasting colors. It all depends on what their eyeballs have become accustomed to, and each visitor’s browsing history paints a different story.

Ideally—and this is, forgive the shameless self-promotion, something YieldBuild already does—you’d correlate incoming traffic source with visitor response to an array of text ad layouts, and then build your ad layout engine to respond appropriately as the mix of traffic sources to a page changes.

If this is beyond the capabilities of what you can do on your site and you’d still like to go it alone, you might try to identify the 3-5 most prominent incoming traffic sources to your site, and test different layouts on pages where just one of these traffic sources predominates. Then, you can make an educated determination of the optimum mix of layouts for pages where incoming traffic is drawn from a number of sources. It might take a lot of work, but as they say in the retail business, knowing your customer is the key.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.