New Rocket Fuel Study Brings Science to Creative Design, Quantifies Design Impact on Ad Campaign Performance
March 12 2015 - 9:00AM
Business Wire
Comprehensive Study Shows Strategic Design
Decisions Can Increase Conversions, by More Than 600% in Some
Verticals
Rocket Fuel (NASDAQ:FUEL), a leading provider of artificial
intelligence (AI) advertising and marketing solutions for global
agencies and brands, today announced the release of its Guide to
Creative Optimization. The analysis quantifies the impact of
specific design choices on conversion rates; by making strategic
design decisions, marketers can increase conversion rates by more
than 600% in some verticals.
The comprehensive study analyzed nearly 40,000 banner ads from
1,076 advertisers across 16 verticals, totaling 23.3 billion
impressions served between November 2013 and June 2014. Researchers
categorized ads to determine which elements played a role in
engaging customer response according to the following criteria:
background color, whether the ad was static or animated, animation
length, call to action, presence of an advertiser logo, presence of
people, and whether an ad’s message contained a special or
limited-time offer.
“Rocket Fuel's Guide To Creative Optimization has achieved
exactly what it set out to do, delivering a rare aggregation of
insights into some of the most important verticals in business,”
said Arthur Ceria, Executive Creative Director and Founder of
Creative Feed. “It’s great to vet and be able to have this
knowledge internally, but also to be able to apply this information
to our clients' work. At the intersection of performance data and
creativity lies opportunity, and it is extremely rare for a company
to both find this knowledge, share it, and allow all of us to be
better.”
“It's important to quantify the role design plays in the success
of advertising campaigns,” said Robert Jones, Research Director at
Rocket Fuel. “Using AI to put the right ad in front of the right
person is only part of the equation. Our research illuminates how
much of an ad's performance is due to controllable factors like
background color or logo placement.”
Key findings of the study include:
- The Color Red, Faces, Animation and
Logo Placement Can Increase Campaign Performance. The color of
backgrounds, use of animation, human faces, showing the product,
and company logo placement all have a significant impact on
performance across all the verticals examined, with specific design
choices showing a strong correlation with higher results, for
example:
- Red backgrounds averaged +31% higher
conversion rates across all verticals, whereas gray backgrounds
averaged -8%.
- Animated creatives averaged 7% higher
conversion rates across most verticals, and animated ads with 6-9
seconds of animation (including loops) averaged the highest rates
among those (138% higher).
- Ads with human faces averaged 4% higher
conversion rates.
- Ads that show the product averaged 6%
higher conversion rates than those that don’t
- Ads with a logo in the lower-left
corner of the ad (as opposed to any other location) averaged 81%
higher conversion rates.
- Commonly Used Design is Not Always
The Most Effective. For many design elements the top-performing
attributes were not the most common. This was highly prevalent in
Telecom, where only 10% of ads included an offer for a free phone
or tablet even though ads that include such offers average 98%
higher conversion rates compared to the category average.
In addition to findings pertinent across verticals, several
vertical-specific insights were discovered to have high impact on
conversions, including:
- Autos: Safety Matters. Creative
averaged higher conversion rates when messaging around safety was
used (+220%, as opposed to fuel efficiency or dependability).
- Entertainment: Celebrity Gender.
Ads featuring male celebrities averaged conversion rates 670%
higher than ads featuring female celebrities, though ads with
female celebrities tended to average the same click-through rates
overall. This seems to be emphasized by trends—while 52% of ads
featured a celebrity of either gender, the breakdowns were heavily
skewed, with 41% of ads featuring male celebrities to only 8%
featuring female celebrities.
- Travel: Length of Trip.
Ads with a length of trip in their messaging averaged conversion
rates a whopping +227% higher than those without that
information.
- Dining: Core Messaging and Special
Offers. The sample included many volume-based offers for
restaurants, e.g. messaging that offered more food at the same
price (such as a free side or a buy-one-get-one-free offer). These
ads averaged conversion rates +284% higher than the vertical
average, better than price-based and contest-based promotions.
“Some might look at the data and conclude that it
over-prescribes creative opportunities,” said Eric Porres, Rocket
Fuel CMO. “But we think the opposite is true. The data illuminates
what has worked well in the past, but it doesn’t limit the
discovery of what might work in the future. One of the best
benefits of programmatic is that it enables affordable and fast
real-world testing of literally any idea or hypothesis you can
imagine. It opens possibilities—it doesn’t close them.”
For more information and to review the full study, please visit
http://info.rocketfuel.com/Programmatic-Creative-Guide.html.
Rocket Fuel does not make any warranty, representation,
guarantee, express or implied, about the study. Any reliance on, or
use of, the study results and/or this press release is at your own
risk.
About Rocket Fuel
Rocket Fuel delivers a leading programmatic media-buying
platform at Big Data scale that harnesses the power of artificial
intelligence (AI) to improve marketing ROI in digital media across
web, mobile, video, and social channels. Rocket Fuel powers digital
advertising and marketing programs globally for customers in North
America, Latin America, Europe, and APAC. Customers trust Rocket
Fuel’s Advertising That Learns® platform to achieve brand and
direct-response objectives in diverse industries from luxury cars
to financial services to retail. Rocket Fuel currently operates in
more than 20 offices worldwide and trades on the NASDAQ Global
Select Market under the ticker symbol “FUEL.” For more information,
please visit http://www.rocketfuel.com or call 1-888-717-8873.
Rocket FuelKenya Hayes, 650-481-6178pr@rocketfuel.com
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