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Female Form Enhances Ad Results -- Followup

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(Yesterday I blogged that after doing research on the web, I found the "magic picture" that was supposed to get a crazy amount of response from readers. Just for fun, I put the image in the post, with a subtitle of something like "This link just shows you a list of grey shirts on Amazon" This is the follow-up to that post with stats and a more detailed follow-up experiment.)

First things first. I added the link to Ms. Gray Shirt's picture yesterday after completing and submitting the article simply because of a test. I felt instead of my just telling you about ads and images, creating a live test would make the information more real to all of us.

And the results were very unusual indeed.

I'm not ready to declare the picture magic just because some guy on the web told me it was cool, but there were several things about yesterday's post that were unusual. First, there was a heated conversation about using pictures that have unknown origins, some folks saying to never use them and others saying to do the best you can to track down owners and then make a decision based on your comfort with the risk. A couple of comments on my blog were so emotional that I had to delete them. Usually when traffic spikes over 7K or so we get the statistically unusual event of a person who is offended, but yesterday there were a few of them, more than normal, all feeling pretty defensive and self-righteous about protecting -- whatever-her-name is. Or something-or-another.

And what was her name, anyway? We never figured it out. I was contacted by at least 4 people who all were very sure they knew who she was -- and all of them had different people in mind. She was an internet meme. She was a childhood friend. She was a girl you knew in college. She posed for these pictures when she was younger. You took that picture yourself last summer (but didn't have the print)

It was especially interesting that for each person who was sure they knew her, there was an palpable emotional attachment, and it was a travesty that I would use her image like I did.

So we spun off into a conversation about copyright, which I humbly believe was a bit of a red herring and non-productive, at least for purposes of talking creating effective FB campaigns and the value of working in walled gardens. At the end, I got emails from 2 of you who apologized for some of the ugly words you said earlier. Once again, not unusual to get flamed of hear an apology, but it's the first time I've gotten two separate apologies as a result of that inside the same hour.

Strange.

I was once again accused of being an evil genius (as I'm sure I will be today as well) and making money off explotation. For the record, with a bit over 7500 visits to the blog, Adsense brought in $5.93. I think you can easily see how this Adsense Master Plan is going to make me master of space and time. (If you can see it, please let me know as well) It always amazes me that when I talk about honestly and analytically looking at human behavior (a key part of any startup) I get the worst comments. It reminds me of the comments some folks make when addiction is discussed. I think perhaps people are bothered when parts of their lives look more deterministic and stimulus-response. We don't like knowing just how much we are on auto-pilot each day. My theory, anyway.

As for the picture-link response, if there had actually been a real ad there, instead of just an affiliate link to a list of gray shirts on Amazon, it would have received the best conversion rate I've ever seen, over 15%. As it was, it generated over 1100 trips to Amazon to see a list of gray shirts (they were very nice gray shirts.)

Sales over on Amazon that the "non-link" generated weren't great, but they beat a sharp stick in the eye. With 7,500+ folks coming by the blog, and 1100+ clicking, I picked up $22.36. Once again, people who look at these things from the outside many times have a distorted view of the amounts of money involved. Yes, these types of ads can generate a lot of money, but all of that is inn the marketing part of the ads, not in the ads themselves. You can't judge an ad by it's cover.

Beer money. But still -- beer money for basically an ad that says "There's nothing here, do not click me" is pretty wild.

Some explanation of this picture's effect can be found in the work of various researchers on how ads impact the reader. The video I saw the other day mentioned Millward Brown, who showed that the image played a roughly 70% role, the body text 20%, and the title only 10%.

Take a minute to let that sink in. 70% of the time it doesn't matter what the body text of your ad is! If your image attracts or repels them, that's all that counts. The guy on the video was talking about just deleting ad titles -- or deleting the entire body text -- and seeing the impact on clicks. He said that ad-hoc studies in the field showed that deleted titles many times would only account for a few percentage points difference. That doesn't mean you shouldn't tweak everything at your disposal, of course, only that you are aware of the relative importance of each item in order to allocate your time wisely.

These studies are increasingly being carried out using more and more sophisticated equipment. One article mentioned using MRI scans to observe participants brain activity as material was consumed. One article explained how a decaying industrial plant was saved by one well-constructed ad of women in various poses in a certain setting. Fascinating stuff, and I plan to do more research in this area and report back here.

I've always believed that images can seriously increase clicks, but I'm not so sure I'm ready to go so far as to say people will click on images no matter what. So if you will indulge me, with your permission I am going to continue my experiment. Let's take the Facebook ad format and play around with how much power images have that text doesn't. I am going to create nine sample ads*, each technically "ok" copy but selling all kinds of weird stuff that may or may not be appropriate to either this blog or the image presented. Maybe some tech, romance stuff, housewares. Various price ranges. Some things that might make sense with the images and some that wouldn't. Please do not click the links -- unless of course you would normally click them. You, the person who is actually reading the article instead of just surfing, are not the subject of this experiment. I'll let this run for a few months and then come back to it and see what we've got. Will folks just scan the text and click the pictures? If so, how many? Does the image or the appropriateness of the text matter more in clicks? I'm almost afraid to ask.

Interesting side note: a couple of years ago I ran a similar article with pictures of a young track star, asking why folks came by, puzzled at how they even found the page. At the time, I was accused of being scummy and trying to take advantage of people, but my intent was to experiment with cause and effect, not to be dishonest in any way. That was two years ago and each day I get over 400 visits from people to that page: men, women, teenagers, kids. Sure, it's all junk traffic (it does not create any significant source of income), but in certain configurations the power of the female form may end up being the most powerful component of any type of visual advertising, and not by just a little bit, but by an order of magnitude or more. I've heard the throw-away you're-a-male-chauvinist pig-dog lines of "Sure, of course men will click on that, it's a pretty girl," or "Don't be base. Sex sells" but I never knew that in reality it was not just men, it was everybody, and it wasn't just an "of course" thing, it was an order of magnitude or more difference in click rates. It's not even a sex thing -- some sexually-charged images are a huge turn-off to various audiences. I think we leave a lot on the table when we just toss out simplistic answers and move on. And while I'm not exactly sure of just how great the impact is, I know it's really, really big, and that's important knowledge to have, whether you're a startup, or just struggling to get your message out.

I would offer to donate any money received to an orphanage or something, but my startup is completely out of runway and and I'm having to go back to consulting (bummer). So even if the links only generate more beer money, something beats nothing. Because of that, I appreciate any assistance you can provide in publicizing this experiment. I felt it was a better use of my time to do some research and try to help others by exploring how this whole Facebook/Ad/Marketing thing. That way, even if there's no more beer money, anybody can come by later on and still get some useful tips on making ads (by reading the articles and comparing the ads below with the results we get, which will be published.)

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*Each image was searched on Google to determine providence and is used here for educational/experimental purposes only. Contact the owner of this blog if you are a copyright holder and the images will be removed immediately. Likewise I am fairly new at using affiliate links. If any of these are inappropriate, let me know immediately and they also will be removed.

5 Comments

Epic experiment. Can't wait to see the results!
Keep on!

[Cliff-notes: The world has been made to be insane, and to try and use basic logic in it, will not get you anywhere.]

I read a lot of blog posts like this, different angles, different reasons, but all basically saying the same thing; "If I follow the law to best of my ability, and I follow the rules companies build on top of those laws to be best of my ability, and approach consumers as sensible entities, I am left with a contradiction that makes it impossible to really adhere to the laws and rules and I also usually find that people react in a way which makes no sense".

...and so you all post and pontificate and try and make sense of it and look for other opinions...and in the end is confusion, conflict. Generally you only get to try and fix those impossible, contradictory, inconsistencies if you can bribe (donate to election campaigns) politicians who make the laws. These laws then are for business purposes and usually written FOR OR EVEN BY the people making the bribes. Please, no one try and pass one over that these are somehow legitimate...oh they may be LEGAL but that is no longer ANY INDICATION of being legitimate, ethical, or other semantics.

This means that you can't apply LOGIC, or ETHICAL BEHAVIOR, or COMMON SENSE. Those are gone. They have been removed from the equation in favor of total control over the environment. I don't mean, the natural environment - I mean our social/economic/legal evolutionary environment - and we are products of it, like we USED TO BE products of oxygen, carbon, seasons, predation, disease, dreams, etc...and all the equilibrium that nature 'strives' for.

The natural environment has been mitigated, subsidized, and minimized in favor of a full-on fascism, and there is no other name for it, no other description for it, and no other more genuine term and we can't imagine another system. We can't imagine any other way. This is our environment. Imagine a world where nature ( tornadoes, earthquakes, famine, etc...) ONLY targeted certain groups of people, or people from certain backgrounds. A world where it seems like the wealthy and connected somehow never have natural disasters, they never have a flood and more-over, when there is a natural disaster, not only do they escape damage time after time, but they always seem to benefit when natural disasters come through. The only natural resource in our environment right now is currency, and if water was only held by one group, and doled out based on misery, would we somehow try and explain that all away with complicated social discussions and how we are bringing it all on ourselves and say "well it's the natural way of things?"

So it comes into focus more, if you treat it like some kind of Quantum Mechanics, where up is down, left is right and the world makes no sense - the normal rules DO NOT APPLY and to try and approach Quantum Mechanics with Newtonian rules, will lead to madness, equations that don't make sense, and a general flailing of logic to make sense of it all.

But ultimately, you are just thrashing. So to me, it all makes perfect sense, it all lines up very nicely with our techno-fascism zoo-keeper's cages and we shouldn't really question why food shows up under that hole in the bars; just eat, Tiger. And if we have any natural inclinations, it's best if we turn that into pacing back and forth in our pen rather than attend to our natural inclinations of consistency.

Enjoyed this series of articles!

Damn Bif, that was an awesome comment.

Yep, I'm thrashing, but I'm hoping to take a couple of thousand fellow hackers with me, and if we arrive at the post-Newtonian world
you describe, it'll be more than just me who got there.

Thanks for the feedback!

Daniel

Daniel,

This is pretty good stuff, the trick is how do you parlay this to females. I would assume that a picture of an attractive guy is not going to garner the same results from that demographic.

Kenton, I should have been more specific. It's not gender-specific, or even sexual-orientation-specific. So buxom women (I assume ones that appear rather non-threatening like Mrs Gray Shirt) appeal across the board to all demographics.

There's probably a lot more complexity to it than that, but for a quick rule-of-thumb, use a female as a model. Works for everybody. Perhaps once you roll something out, you can A/B test all sorts of other combinations, like male models for female audiences. But I'm willing to bet girls are the safest choice; you just vary the underlying sexuality depending on whether your demographic is kids, young males, older women, etc.

I was really surprised that such a broad rule could mostly be true. I always thought that once you made a decision whether to show a girl or boy model, you were matching it up to the gender or sexual preferences of the viewer. But that's not always so, it seems.

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Comment Policy: I really, really, really enjoy comments, but if all you have to offer is general platitudes like how happy you are to have found my site and what a wonderful place it is, I will delete your comment and report your comment as spam. Please try to either tell me I am wrong, sympathize with my point, expand on what I'm saying, or offer your own experiences or opinions. If you just want a link your best bet is to just ask for one. Probably won't work, but at least be honest about it. No name-calling and please keep the profanity as low as possible. If your grandma can't read it or you wouldn't say it in person, don't write it here. Thanks.

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on April 6, 2011 12:46 PM.

Why Does Facebook Hate This Woman? was the previous entry in this blog.

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Recent Comments

  • DanielBMarkham: Kenton, I should have been more specific. It's not gender-specific, read more
  • Kenton Smeltzer: Daniel, This is pretty good stuff, the trick is how read more
  • DanielBMarkham: Damn Bif, that was an awesome comment. Yep, I'm thrashing, read more
  • Bif: [Cliff-notes: The world has been made to be insane, and read more
  • Agile Scout: Epic experiment. Can't wait to see the results! Keep on! read more

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