Design for a Higher Click Through Rate

Click Through Rate, or, CTR, is what many webmasters use as a measure of their success with online advertisement publishing. CPM, or eCPM, is another, which is the cost per thousand impressions. If an ad pays by CPM, that's easy to figure, if it pays by click, then it's figured by counting the clicks you have per thousand on average.

I have been doing a couple months of experimenting with some designs for ads and came up with some interesting findings, somewhat going against conventional wisdom of ad publishing.

If you hang out in publisher forums long enough you read over and over again about "blending your ads", which, in effect, means making them appear just like part of the content. The same background color, text color, link color and no border making the ad stand out. There is a logic in this, and it does work. If the visitor sees no vivid design that makes it stand out as an ad, they are more likely to click it. In my experience from a few years back, simple dropping the border around ads and blending in the colors, not changing the location at all resulted in a 50% increase in CTR.

However, I have found over the last couple of months that a method of making them stand out also seems to work. Not standing out with simple background colors and borders, but with eye catching design. What I have done across a couple of sites is place rectangle ad blocks inside a frame of sorts, making the ads appear as though they are printed on stickynotes, tacked up pieces of paper, clipped paper or the like. Not using the simply 1 pixel border that ad systems provide, but an eye catching, appealing, graphically driven border that looks like something we are all familiar with.

In doing this, I noticed a 20%-30% increase in CTR and eCPM for the month I used it over the month I just had them "blended in".

I did contact Google about this, as they have a very nebulous rule against "imagery gimmicks" to attract clicks. It appears, given that these design ideas have no blinking, flashing, arrows or other misleading or distracting images, this method does not violate their terms of service. Considering Google is far and away the most totalitarian system in such topics, this leads me to believe that it doesn't violate the terms of service of any of the other major systems, either.

I plan to do some further testing, but, common sense dictates not to use, this, or any, technique everywhere. Use it where it's effective. If an ad came be seamlessly placed within content, then do that, and blend the design. If, however, the ad is placed in a location that would otherwise be empty white-space and isn't a seamless part of the content, this method of design has proven to be pretty effective based on my tests.

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