Ad unit sizes and clickthrough rate
By Jason Menayan September 19th, 2008MarketingSherpa has released the results of a study looking at the clickthrough performance of the most popular ad unit sizes:
In some ways, the general picture this data paints is not surprising:
- the 300×250 medium rectangle is almost always placed contextually, juxtaposed with content. This is always a good strategy to get visitors to notice.
- the 728×90 leaderboard is typically placed at the very top of the page, so it is one of the first things that visitors notice.
- the 160×600 wide skyscraper is usually positioned in the navigation column, often below navigational/informational links or widgets. I’d suspect the performance of this ad unit has the widest variance (although I don’t have the data to say one way or another)
Although the 728×90 leaderboard signficantly outperforms the 468×60 banner, clickthrough performance is not solely a function of size. In fact, placement is probably a better indicator. Take a look at the YieldBuild Lab Heat Map to see the most common placements of ad units across the top 100,000 (by traffic) websites.
This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 3:16 pm 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.
September 30th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Thank you Jason for pointing to these important issues.
We should reflect on the ad unit sizes and clickthrough rates from another perspective, too.
When we get the statistics of a 0.37 % click through rate of the so-called best performing ad size that means that 99.63% of all visitors have had to ‘live with’ the add on the webpage without having any benefit from it (exactly like the webmaster!).
Everybody who has been involved in the commercializing of the traffic on web pages for a longer time will remember how banner ads lost their value – the surfers simply learned to avoid seeing the banner ads. Many more or less smart applications have been developed to avoid that mechanism to be able still to catch the attention of the visitor. This is obvious a kind of intrusion or disturbance of the visitor to the webpage.
The textural ads pioneered by Google’s Adsense have been thriving on its added value to the visitor by adding relevant links to the site. But probably because many marketers have misused this basic mechanism to lure the visitors to click on the text adds, we are all becoming more blind towards such ads.
This is clearly documented in the immense differences of the click through rate of Adsense on different websites. As I see it, the more relevant adds the website is offering the higher a click through rate will be the result.
The conclusion of these mechanisms would be that it is much more important for the webmaster as well as for the visitor to have ad units that are serving as close as possible the need of the visitors. The more added value the ads are signaling the fewer visitors will avoid clicking on the adds and the fewer will react toward the adds as a disturbance to the content of the website.
The problem might be that it can be difficult to have Google serve the most relevant Adsense offers related to each post on a blog, as the identification of the blog content might not be enough specific to the individual blog post e.g. of a WordPress blog but the identification to the content is more or less based on the whole blog’s content, or at least on all the posts that appear on the front page of the blog.
I think these observations are important too when we discuss “Is Web 2.0 rewarding poor quality?“ see http://blog.yieldbuild.com/2008/09/23/is-web-20-rewarding-poor-quality/
To your success.
Soren from Island Vacation Tips