By Todd
There’s an old saying in marketing that 50% of marketing works and 50% is crap – but no one knows which 50% works and which 50% to ditch. Thankfully we aren’t totally in the dark, and we’re not without tools to learn how to increase our percentages of valuable ad placement and ad design.
With the advent of more and more targeted ads around the web, the competition for viewers attention grows more aggressive every day. A main aspect of that competition is the appeal of each ad for the quality of its product and the visual appeal of the presentation of that product in a 150px square space (for instance). In order to understand the potential of such a small space, we’re taking on a study of the role of visual design in increasing click rates for targeted advertising.
We’ve partnered with Matthew Smith at Squared Eye to learn more about the return on investment for strong design. In addition to detailed content and interface design Squared Eye runs Pattern Tap, an organized library of web design inspiration. Pattern Tap has been working with BuySellAds.com from its beta beginnings, and has seen quite a few ads of different types and ranges listed on the site. Matthew recently approached us to learn more about the relationship between different kinds of ad design and the related click through rates.
We will be using sample data from billions of impressions, millions of clicks, and thousands of different creative units to bring advertisers some actionable advice for when they are designing their ad units.
Stay tuned… we will be publishing the results here on the BSA blog.
