Irritating Flashing Bright Colored Ads

John Payne with MedTech Publishing forwarded me a note from a reader who was complaining about the number of irritating, flashing, bright-colored ads on his site, Healthcare IT News. John asked a great question about whether these flashing ads were a norm online and if this was more of a rogue comment or a real problem in publishing. With his permission, I have attached an exerpt from my reply to him and a screenshot of this site the reader was talking about.

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John, overall, the site’s not too bad. There are 12 paid ad positions per page (or 16 depending on how you count it) and that doesn’t include house promotional ads. This is on the high side, but not necessarily out of line depending on your market dynamics. Some thoughts for you…  (NOTE: If you’d like to see a full size screenshot of the Healthcare IT News site, click here.) 

1. There are two things to consider here: not only the animation of the ads, but the number of ad units on a page. Just as in print, you want to attain a good ad-edit balance for the reader and for the advertiser. The more ad positions you have, the more you need to control the animation of the creatives. You want to avoid having your pages look like Vegas or Times Square as it can indeed be very distracting to a reader and counter-productive for the advertisers.

2. The more ad positions you have, the less the response will be to any given ad. Let’s say you get a person to click on an ad one out of every 100 page views (1%). If you only have 2 ads per page, that would mean that each ad would get on average 0.5% click through rate (CTR) (1% / 2). But if you have 10 ads per page, each ad would only average 0.1% CTR (1% / 10). Personally, I like to see no more than 4 visual ad units per page and then a bank of sponsored text links toward the bottom, but I realize that different markets require different approaches.

3. Consider changing some of your smaller ad position to text-based ad units. They will typically get higher CTRs and be less obtrusive to the reader. Win-win. I see that you have a pay-per-click text ad system in place. Just a thought, but see if maybe you couldn’t get more money selling text ads on a flat price per month rather than a PPC basis. I like the PPC approach in some markets, but I’ve often seen that publishers make more money selling these ads direct on a flat monthly sponsorship instead.

4. Listen to your readers and advertisers, but use judgment before rushing off in haste to make sweeping changes too quickly. Readers will always want all the content for free and with absolutely no ads. Advertisers will always want their ad to completely dominate the page so they get all the attention. As a publisher, we have to balance the needs of both readers and advertisers. My opinion, if you get a couple comments, you should take note, but probably don’t need to take action. But If you are seeing a trend developing with several comments or hard data like declining traffic or site abandonment, then definitely take action.

Have a site, email newsletter, or other product that you’d like some feedback on? Send it my way!