This is a tale of two ads that started running on my company’s FinalCutters website from its launch in April:
The ad on the left (Killer Secrets) produced far more clicks than the ad on the right (Loader). Here are the stats for a couple of weeks:
27th April to 3rd May
Killer Secrets: 21 clicks per 1000 visits
Loader: 2 clicks per 1000 visits
4th May to 10th May
Killer Secrets: 16 clicks per 1000 visits
Loader: 1 click per 1000 visits
Very bad news for the Loader ad, so I decided to try an experiment. I reckoned that there were two things working in the favour of the Killer Secrets ad:
- There’s no company name so it isn’t obviously an ad (for an eBook) and could easily be seen as a link to a tutorial or some other content.
- It is static rather than animated. Do users really have the time or inclination to sit and wait for an ad to run round the loop?
So I remade the Loader ad to look like this:
The results were quite dramatic:
11th May to 17th May
Killer Secrets: 25 clicks per 1000 visits
Loader: 7 clicks per 1000 visits
18th May to 24th May
Killer Secrets: 19 clicks per 1000 visits
Loader: 7 clicks per 1000 visits
Yes the Killer Secrets ad is still the more striking one but even so that’s a 466% increase for clicks on the new Loader ad compared to the previous 2 week period! Job done.
Hmnn… I think there might be some research on human response to colour also.. will try and dig out. Do you think that if your ‘traffic’ doesn’t clic on anything with FCP written on it immediately that we self destruct?..