Three Easy Ways Of Improving Your Rich Media Ads Performance

Here are three (3) easy and practical tips to use within the creative of your rich media display ad campaign, all of which are backed up by real live past campaign metrics.

1. Use human faces: People for whatever reason love to click on other people’s faces. So play to this behavior.  Somehow weave at least one human face into your unexpanded ad (e.g., what Pointroll calls the banner).

2. Use buttons: It’s amazing how many fancy-pants designer types look down on the use of buttons.  News flash.  They work and attract clicks. So use them when appropriate instead of just assuming users know to click on just the images.

As is visual demonstrated within these actual real data heat maps of clicks, peoples faces and buttons are what generates most of the clicks. Products produce far less less.

3. Keep intro animations sequences short: The data across all of the different ad sizes clearly supports that the clicks start coming the moment the intro animation sequence ends.  At 14-15 seconds, the number of clicks peak and slowly tappers off.  The opportunity here is to shift these curves to the left, so as to minimize the lose rate of users that abandon and do not click.

There is a marked inflection point within each of these charts at 15 seconds - the average publisher max allowed time for an animation sequence to occur within. So if you want more clicks, shorten the intro flash animation sequences!