Text Ad Format Myths – Optimization’s goal is determining one “best” ad layout
By Jason Menayan October 1st, 2007The goal of time-consuming and laborious ad format optimization should be to find the holy grail of ad formats, one whose color, placement and format magically achieve the optimum clickthrough rate and revenue for the page. Right?
Wrong.
What must be one of the strongest testaments to the adage “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” in this business, YieldBuild has consistently found that a set of different “good” layouts beats a single “great” layout in overall page performance. Although, head to head, any one of these “good” layouts would underperform the best-performing layout, a system where all the “good” layouts cycle on the page actually bests the supposed best layout.
What this means in practice is that once your optimization testing has yielded an array of high-performing layouts, you’ll do yourself a favor by filtering them all into your ad formatting system, rather that performing even more optimization testing to find the supposed standard-bearer.
Keep in mind, though, that the set of high-performing layouts will continue to change over time, so you’ll need to generate and cycle in new tested layouts, and continue to retire old layouts that cease being able to perform up to par.
YieldBuild does all of this automatically, but if for whatever reason you’d like to implement your own optimization scheme, please keep this insight in mind.
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.
August 10th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Although I agree with most of your tips, this one I am not sure of. Granted, we will never find the “best” layout available, but assuming a finite set of layouts, each one will have a given performance depending on where it is used, for what users, and what time of day (along with other more complicated factors). If you are going to broadly have a layout run on a set of pages, I would say having the best performing that you are aware of, rather than an even rotation of say the top 3.
In an ideal world, you will find out which of your top 3 performs best in what circumstances, and apply them each 100% of the time to their respective areas. But it sounds like you are saying that applying an even rotation of layouts with different performance would be better than simply using the top. It is this specific point that I disagree with.
August 10th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
[...] 1. Bigger ads produce better yields 2. Ads that blend into the page background perform better 3. Optimization’s goal is determining one “best” ad layout 4. Once you’ve created an optimized set of layouts for a page, you’re done 5. All site visitors [...]