I’ve recently returned from the annual PubCon conference in Las Vegas, in which I attended the “Contextual Ad Program Vendor Roundtable.” Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager with Google’s AdSense program, described an interesting case study that underscores the adage that “less is more,” at least with respect to determining the right number of ads to run on a page.

Ghosemajumder recounted an AdSense publisher, a forum, that experimented with the frequency with which ads were running on his site, reducing them from running on every page impression, to one in every 10 impressions (I believe he initially did so to reduce their annoyance to forum members). He had expected his eCPM to drop, but, in fact, it increased. The conclusion drawn was that seeing ads on every page impression made forum members numb to them, but seeing them rarely made the ads stand out and command attention, thereby encouraging a click.

This study reminded me of a couple of conclusions that we had come to, drawing on our own data:

1.  several “good” layouts, running in rotation, generally outperform a solitary “great” layout
2. fewer ads on a page can outperform more ads on a page

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Why the data bear these conclusions out is not exactly clear, although there does seem to be a benefit in keeping a page’s ad layout a bit unpredictable. Consistency is the bane of optimum ad performance when the bulk of your site’s visitors are repeats—they simply learn to ignore ads when they know exactly where they are.

When running YieldBuild, a publisher specifies the number of zones he/she would like to test, with the understanding that not all zones will necessarily be filled with ads. It is, in fact, often the case that zones remain empty when they could be occupied by ads, and the layout arrangement changes from page view to page view, even though YieldBuild’s goal is eCPM maximization.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 4:46 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.