Lessons Learned from New Web Design

8.25.2009 | Web Design

As you may know, EasyAutoSales upgraded our look and feel to our 3rd iteration in early August. While the 2nd iteration provided many improvements over the first, we felt we can do a lot better. So what did we learn?

  • Leaderboard banners can have great click-through rates or terrible ones depending on where the placement is. In version 2, we placed the banner within the main content area and received great CTR’s. In the current version, it is blended in with the background and placed outside the main content area (visually); the CTR’s are terrible.
  • 160×600 banners perform better than 120×600 banners.
  • However, ads isn’t the only story. Improved visual design does bring a number of positive changes including more page views per session and longer session times.
  • Unfortunately this could potentially mean good content is competing directly against good ad CTR. The cure may be to focus on selling CPM ads instead of CPA or CPC ads.
  • Russell Jurney
    Wei,

    Really? I thought most of the internet concluded that adrev is an nonviable model for a business, years ago?

    Charging money for listings is good. It makes sense.

    But ads? Think this through. If I'm going to your site to find car listings... and you're showing me google ads, then one of two things is happening:

    1) You are leading people away to competing sites.

    2) You are polluting the quality of the presentation of the search results, leading people away to other sites.

    Yours is a case where showing ads undermines the quality of what you are doing. Which is why your adrevs are low - who wants to see unrelated ads when they are just looking to buy or sell a car? That just irritates people, and the only time they would click is to go to a competitor's site.

    Anyway, just my two cents but I think if you look at it from a customer's perspective you'll see that ads undermine your offering. For most sites they wouldn't. For yours, they do. Severely.
  • Wei
    @Henri - We can discuss privately off-line. Google doesn't like webmasters sharing numbers though.
  • Wei -

    can you share the data helped you drawn those conclusions?
  • Wei
    Russell,

    I think you may be the only person in the world that doesn't believe in Google AdSense or online ads.
  • Russell Jurney
    There is something extremely counter-intuitive about offering google ads on a car search site - you are essentially polluting your own results. All people want to see are car ads, they are totally uninterested in anything Google is going to serve. It seems that the ads cut the quality of the site in half - or worse, and don't drive much revenue, right?

    What am I missing? Why have semi-random google ads at all? They strongly undermine everything you are trying to do.
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