YieldBuild optimizes online ad spots for publishers, maximizing revenue across networks, layouts and formats. But what if you’re an advertiser, and want to optimize the response rate to your banner ads?

There are a few companies that have created optimization services for advertisers that tweak design elements within the ad in order to improve click-through:

• SnapAds: Profiled by TechCrunch today, SnapAds takes creative from a network, agency or advertiser, and creates a large set of permutations with which to test. Backgrounds, calls to action and other aesthetic elements seem to be teased out of a multilayered source file provided to SnapAds, and are tracked for performance. The result is an ad (or small set of ads) that outperform the average. In one test, the SnapAds-identified ad format outperformed the original by almost 2000%.
• Tumri: Tumri’s AdPod parses out the core elements of a good banner ad: the product message, image, brand and call-to-action. Provided with a number of variants for each, AdPod can cycle through all the variations and determine those combinations that perform best.
• Personiva: Personiva’s AdaptiveAds, currently in beta, tout personalization down to the visitor level. Ads change depending on “environment, behavior and interest,” which I would take to mean context, although AdaptiveAds likely do something similar to Tumri and SnapAds: allow advertisers to test a wide variety of creatives with audience-targeted messages.

Why is this important? Banner ads are struggling to demonstrate their worth these days. And, while aesthetic concerns are important, they are not paramount, and leaving creative optimization to your creative team might not necessarily achieve optimal performance.

Before YieldBuild, I worked at QuinStreet, where the best practices team was constantly testing the effects of layout, format and other visual changes of ads, landing pages, and microsites. Sometimes subtle or seemingly inconsequential changes could have a significant impact on a piece of creative’s ability to engage a visitor. Thankfully, technology, such as YieldBuild for publishers, or Tumri, Personiva, and SnapAds, for advertisers, is making that work far more extensible and granular.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 4:02 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.