- A weblog by InetSolution
Rotating versus Static Ads - Which to Use On Your Website?
By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Oct 30, 2007
The goal of ads on your website is to generate clicks. As marketers, we have trouble limiting ourselves to just one ad on our home page, and eventually our home pages become a cluttered carnival of ads. Each additional ad dilutes the impact of the other ads on the page and thus click-through rates decline.
Donovan and I are working with a client whose home page has this exact problem. Our new design will show only one large graphic ad (instead of the five it shows now) on the home page, but the company still needs to show multiple ads throughout the campaign period. We had to decide whether to show a single, but different, ad on each page refresh, or to use code to change the ads every X seconds while the user sits on the page. How did we decide?
An ad rotator is the sexy solution that most marketers gravitate toward first. Used properly, it is an effective way to efficiently use screen space to show several ads or stories to a visitor. A good example is the news story rotator on the MSN.com home page.
Screenshot of msn.com showing their story rotator
Each feature displays for nine seconds, long enough for the reader to absorb and process the promo:
Cycling through three story promos takes roughly 30 seconds. That's a long time for a reader to stay on a page, but I think it works for MSN because the page has timely news headlines that take 10 to 30 seconds for an average reader to scan and process.
Headlines that surround the rotator keep people on the page for a few seconds longer
During that time, peripheral vision is hard at work picking up the features rotating in that space.
Our client's home page, like most business websites, isn't news rich nor does it have content that changes by the hour. Visitors in our target group stay on their home page for less than three seconds. Most users visit the site to use one tool, online banking, so they instantly click the button to logon to online banking and leave the home page.
Each of the three ads on their website this morning take between 11 and 17 seconds for me and the two other people I drafted into market research duty to read. So what is the likelihood that visitors are paying attention to any of the three 11-to-17-seconds-to-read ads in the three seconds they spend on the home page? About as likely as Bill & Hillary naming their next dog Monica.
If we put each of these ads into a rotator, we'd need visitors to stay on the page for 30 to 50 seconds to see all three. Unless the ads are extremely compelling, which they aren't, then we're not going to get 50 seconds of visitor attention.
We set two goals for the new home page:
1) Create ads that take less than four to six seconds to read & process
2) Double the time that visitors spend on the home page
The first goal will be easy, we've got a pretty good formula we use for creating these types of ads. For goal #2, we theorize that we'll be able to double the time visitors spend on this page by putting the online banking logon form and two new content widgets in line-of-sight of the ad on the home page.
Since we know that each ad will require at least four seconds to process and we're only going to get six seconds of each visitor's attention, we decided that there would be little benefit in using an ad rotator since people would be unlikely to see ads beyond the first.
But why not have the best of both worlds? After all, we're not just marketers and designers, we have top notch programming talent under the Inet roof, too. We can create an ad rotator that also randomizes the first ad in the rotation on each page load. Now we can make sure that each visitor will see a different ad on each home page visit AND can show multiple ads to those people who deviate from the norm and spend more than six seconds on the home page.
Wow, this post was much longer than I planned, so let me summarize the main point in 100 words or less. When deciding whether to use static or rotating ads, determine how long it takes for a visitor to read & process your ad. Next, measure how long visitors spend on the page where you're displaying the ads. If visitors spend less time on the page than it takes to read a single ad, you may get more ad clicks (assuming your ads are compelling) if you randomize on page load rather than via an ad rotator.
