Case study: blurry ads

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zany zoroaster

zany zoroaster

Señior Member
Apr 1, 2007
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Background
A while back I saw the below banner and the bluriness freaked me out.

Untitled.jpg


I floated the idea at WF that this could be an intentional tactic for getting visitors' attention, most people thought that this was a glitch or that I was douchetastic, and some people encouraged me to test this theory out. I put my money where my mouth is and the result is this case study.

Setup
I set out to create an adwords campaign, running on the content network with two banner ads: one blurry like the above, and one a sharp "control" ad. I picked a premium sunglass store to promote, based on the loose logic that people seeing a blurry ad might be concerned about their vision and will want to protect their eyes :cool: . The keywords I targeted were celebrity and fashion related.

Test ad:
blurryad.gif


Control ad:
sharpad.gif


Results
I ran the campaign until I reached my budget for this test, at 246 clicks for 992,118 impressions. Here is a snapshot of the campaign's statistics at the end of the trial:

adwords-snapshot.gif


Up until about 80 clicks, both ads were in lock-step and there was absolutely no difference in the clickthrough. But towards the end, you can see that the sharp "control" ad won out by an extra 26 clicks (the control had a CTR of 0.0279% versus the blurry ad's CTR of 0.0232% ). I think the numbers are significant enough so that we can make some conclusions. My original hypothesis regarding the attention grabbing properties of blurry ads has proven to be wrong in this case.

Overall, the campaign itself did not result in any conversions. I attribute this to a somewhat unorthodox LP approach I took, and possibly to the nature of the content network itself.

I hope this case study is helpful for you,

- ZZ
 
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Nice experiment!

I'm guessing that the sharper ad pops out way more and that's why it got more clicks.
 
Nice case study.

What kind of celebrity related keywords were you bidding on? I'm guessing your ad was being shown on non-relevant pages?
 
"I picked a premium sunglass store to promote, based on the loose logic that people seeing a blurry ad might be concerned about their vision and will want to protect their eyes"

No offense, but this makes no sense to me. If my vision is blurry, I would be interested in reading or corrective vision glasses, not sun glasses.
 
Come on, no conversions. How the hell do we draw conclusions? All we really see is that the sharp got more clicks, but yet no conversions.

Please try again, without "unorthadox" LP's and let us know.

Yes sharp may have better CTR but does it convert better is the real question.
 
@Rage9 - I set out to test only whether a particular ad design will get more clicks, conversions are not something that I was aiming to test. As jryan21 noted, my ads and LPs are subpar at the moment, so that is likely the reason why this campaign didn't perform in my case.

I am glad that many people find it useful and are stimulated to post their own case studies - I'll post other experiments as I go along.
 
zany zoroaster said:
@Rage9 - I set out to test only whether a particular ad design will get more clicks, conversions are not something that I was aiming to test. As jryan21 noted, my ads and LPs are subpar at the moment, so that is likely the reason why this campaign didn't perform in my case.

I am glad that many people find it useful and are stimulated to post their own case studies - I'll post other experiments as I go along.
Click to expand...
Fucking hell. Dude, that image was not deliberately blurry. Your test was meaningless from the start.
 
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