It stands to reason that ads that naturally integrate into the general style of a page are more likely to get clicked on, since they suggest they flow with the content of the page.

And often this is the case. On many pages, we’ve been amazed to see YieldBuild slowly but surely, from among the millions of style and placement permutations possible, arrive at a format the blends beautifully into the style of the page, from color, placement and even border style.

But not always.

Quite often, we’ve actually seen the contrary – a style completely incongruous with its surroundings outperforms the blended style. On a background of pastel colors, a bright red ad will turn out to be the best performing. A dull gray ad can surprisingly do better than all other variants on a brightly-colored page.

We here at YieldBuild have seen it happen enough times to know that there is no hard-and-fast rule with respect to format blending and performance. Each page should be optimized by itself, according to its unique traffic blend, to determine whether eye-dazzling, subtle, or a blend provides the greatest receptivity among visitors.

Tip: Try introducing a subtle/blended approach for one ad zone where you’ve been using bright/contrasting colors (or the other way around – one bright ad where the rest of the page has been using blended colors) and see what kind of impact the change has. As a second step, iterate towards more-subtle or more-contrasting colors to hone in on an optimum color/format. Finally, be sure to shake things up a bit, every 100,000 PVs or so, to see how your audience responds to changes.

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.