Welcome back! I am Ryan Seacrest and this is not American Idol (nor am I Ryan Seacrest). For those of you who don’t know what this banner ads case study is about please read this.

The Results:

Mr Green readers voted 43% for banner 4:

24% for banner 3:

19% for banner 2:

13% for banner 1:

I’m sorry but your votes don’t make the decisions, the wonderful panel of Plenty of Fish users do. Which means that 81% of readers guessed wrong leaving 19% of voters picking the correct ad.

*Side note: Did you know that if all you voters had have taken a wild guess, statically 25% of you should of picked the correct banner.

Before I read out the results, I would just like to say that I feel like an extremely generous guy, ’cause these results are ridonkulous.

Winner:

Banner 2 - 0.41% CTR,  $ 0.31 CPC

Readers who commented the correct answers in the comments: Harshad, Jonathan Volk, Artur, POF Ben, Josh Todd, Farmer, Krupesh and Stian (Sorry to the 56 others who answered correctly, but the poll doesn’t show names).

Banner 3- 0.13% CTR, $ 1.25 CPC
Banner 4 – 0.09% CTR, $ 1.38 CPC
Banner 1 – 0.02% CTR, $ 2.81 CPC

My Thoughts:

The white space on banner 2 absoultely owned! If you are testing ads like these already, you are missing out. The difference between this ad’s performance and the normal ad layouts is huge. Why do I think banner 2 did so well? I feel that it changes the landscape of POF. POF users must be so used to seeing full colored 728×90 ads, but this banner is just a standard size ad in a 728×90 space. Basically, it’s a banner blindness killer. The big surprise for me was the standard size ad, now that got owned.

Ridiculous Projections:

Now let’s say in theory a dating company came with a $ 100,000 budget looking to run the exact campaign as above. And they knew their average conversion rate of 5% from ad to sale (worth $ 50).

Banner 1 would have generated $ 88,967 worth of sales.

Banner 2 would have generated $ 806,451 worth of sales.

In all of the case studies I’ve run on this blog, this has generated by far the biggest margin ads.

Hope at least one of you will go out and start doing some testing using this ad layout, it frikin’ rocks. Thanks to all that voted!

Mr Green

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