Display Creative Benchmark Report 2024
Intro
We analyzed the ad creatives from our client base in order to produce some benchmarks and insights. We will continue to add some insights to this report as we consolidate and package them.
This analysis looked at around 10,000 different creatives. Here are some summary metrics from the the analysis:
Industry CTR Benchmarks
Words Per Inch
One of the best insights to come from this analysis is the correlation between number of words to creative efficiency (CTR). In other words, what does performance look like when you pivot performance by the number of words per inch (WPI)?
You can see there is a significant drop off in CTR at the 5 words / inch mark. Why is this the case? Display ads are the billboards of the internet. As such, creative messaging is the primary vehicle for value transmission. If the ad copy is too long, viewers can fail to absorb the messaging of the ad.
A wall of text doesn't hit the same as pithy prose...
It is important to realize that the vast majority of users will NOT click on the ad (99%!). Just like a roadside billboard's main role is not to get you to click on it (you literally can't...), the main goal of a digital display ad is either value or insight transmission or to create a memory making moment.
Consider what things can be communicating in a few words...
- A statistic
- A thought provoking question
- A humorous sentiment
- A clear value proposition
- A joke
Writing good ad copy is hard and it takes a lot of work to craft something that can leave an impact within the constraints of a given creative size. That means per creative size, you need to make sure you stay in these ranges of word count wise:
| Creative Size | Words |
|---|---|
| 970x250 | 26 - 105 |
| 300x600 | 20 - 78 |
| 160x600 | 10 - 42 |
| 300x250 | 8 - 33 |
| 320x50 | 2-7 |
In thee world of ad copy, less is more. Be thoughtful and intentional with the language you use on your ad creative.
Creative Objects
Designing creative ads is a tension between simplicity and interest. You have a limited amount of space for design and messaging to create a “memory making moment” experience. You need punchy messaging that transmits value (no more than 4 words per inch! See previous post…) and you need appropriate compelling imagery to drive that message home.
But what kind of imagery should adorn your ad copy?
First, do you need any imagery in your ad creative? In general, yes, you should.
Creatives without any graphical component ( only text) perform at 0.12% (-0.03% below our benchmark). Creatives with a graphical component performed at 0.18% (+0.03% above our benchmark.
With that said, not all graphical components are equally impactful. For example, we observed a number of objects that were associated with lower performing creatives.
Note that all of these performed as well as or worse than NOT having an image in your creative. They made no difference to the performance of the campaign.
On the other end, we can see a number of different objects that performed really well.
From "people" (which represents all creatives where real humans were the main subject) up we start to see objects that are associated with better performing campaigns. “Security Fob” was the strongest performing object in the creatives we performed.
This leads us to the one of the most important learnings from objects in creatives:
The objects and graphics of the ad creative need to correlate with the messaging of the creative.
The more the creatives correlate with, support, and even integrate with the ad messaging the better they perform. The less the graphics correlate with the ad messaging the worse the performance. The best performing object, the "security fob", was utilized in a series of creatives that promoted a physical security product. The security fob was an actual product image!
When it comes to utilizing objects in your creative make sure they are strongly correlated to your ad copy. If you don't have the creative space or time to do so, then fall back on more generic usage of people or shapes to add at least a little bit of texture and personality to your ads.