It would make ad format optimization a lot easier if all you had to do was come up with a set of best-performing ad layouts for a page, and be done with it. If only it were that easy!

The reasons it unfortunately doesn’t work this way are two-fold:

1) A page’s traffic sources typically change over time. Each traffic source’s visitors have varying responses to different ad formats and layouts, depending on what site they had visited before. As the balance of visitors tilts in a new direction, the page’s ad layouts should respond accordingly.

2) For sites that rely on repeat visitors, ad blindness can set in, and without some variation, repeat users will unconsciously ignore ads (even those that worked like gangbusters the previous month), reducing clickthrough. Continually coming up with new, best-performing ad layouts is an undeniable need if your goal is to maintain or increase clickthrough rates.

This might sound more daunting than it is. It does require, however, continuously generating new layout variants, testing to see which perform best, and adding those to the collection of layouts cycled on the page. It also, naturally, requires putting a few former great layouts out to pasture. But the payoff is worth the effort.

This insight is what drove us to build this functionality into YieldBuild – i.e. YieldBuild continually creates and simultaneously tests new layouts, while disposing of layouts that no longer do the trick.

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.