A Tale of Two Ads

This is a tale of two ads that started running on my company’s FinalCutters website from its launch in April:

    

The ad on the left (Killer Secrets) produced far more clicks than the ad on the right (Loader). Here are the stats for a couple of weeks:

27th April to 3rd May
Killer Secrets: 21 clicks per 1000 visits
Loader: 2 clicks per 1000 visits

4th May to 10th May
Killer Secrets: 16 clicks per 1000 visits
Loader: 1 click per 1000 visits

Very bad news for the Loader ad, so I decided to try an experiment. I reckoned that there were two things working in the favour of the Killer Secrets ad:

  1. There’s no company name so it isn’t obviously an ad (for an eBook) and could easily be seen as a link to a tutorial or some other content.
  2. It is static rather than animated. Do users really have the time or inclination to sit and wait for an ad to run round the loop?

So I remade the Loader ad to look like this:

    

The results were quite dramatic:

11th May to 17th May
Killer Secrets: 25 clicks per 1000 visits
Loader: 7 clicks per 1000 visits

18th May to 24th May
Killer Secrets: 19 clicks per 1000 visits
Loader: 7 clicks per 1000 visits

Yes the Killer Secrets ad is still the more striking one but even so that’s a 466% increase for clicks on the new Loader ad compared to the previous 2 week period! Job done.

Apple’s Get a Mac ads are back on form

Just when it was looking like the campaign was running out of steam, there are some new Get a Mac ads that had me laughing out loud again. Apart from the great writing and performances, the thing I like most about these is the sheer audacity of it all.

There were various reports a while back that viewers empathised with the PC character more than the Mac character but looking at how Apple’s marketshare is doing, it probably doesn’t matter. The ads (and the iPhone) sure are doing the trick!

http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/