Bigger is better, right?

In the world of text ads, simple sayings like that rarely hold true. In this specific case, they really don’t.

Despite the commonly-held perception that bigger ads are more likely to capture the attention of a viewer and entice him/her to click, our experience using YieldBuild across a number of very different sites paints a complex picture. On some pages, bigger ads perform better. On others, more, smaller ads perform better. Seemingly without rhyme or reason, different visitors respond differently to differently-sized ads on different pages.

Wow, sounds like something the Mad Hatter would say. But it’s true. Some visitors might find larger ads too aggressive and will avoid them. Others need something that stands out from the page’s text to warrant attention. This sort of guesswork is interesting, but thankfully YieldBuild doesn’t require us to really understand the whys of visitors’ behavior with respect to text ads. It just consistently knows the hows of ad formatting and optimization and what it takes to achieve higher clickthroughs and revenue.

If you decide to go it alone, just keep in mind that the best ad size on one page of your site won’t necessarily be the best everywhere—make sure to optimize each page or set of pages by their format/layout and traffic type, and be sure to reoptimize when traffic patterns change.

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.