5 Mad Scientist Experiments for Digital Advertising

Introduction

Not all mad scientists are villains or evil in nature. In fact, some may have good spirited intentions, even if their actions are dangerous or questionable, which can make them accidental villains. Some are even protagonists, such as Dexter in the animated series Dexter’s Laboratory, for those who remember the zany, boy genius who had an endless collection of inventions. Nonetheless, digital advertising involves a lot of experimentation, especially with images, colors, and fonts. If you’re invested in digital advertising, you should feel more comfortable about experimenting with your digital ads often, continuously refining certain elements to maximize performance. We wanted to brief you on some experiments to get the best performance out of your digital ads, and we’ll go ahead and get started.

Choose Easy-to-View Colors

It’s best to customize the color schemes of your digital ads, including the background and font color. You should consider aligning the color scheme of the template with the content of your image and be careful of your color choices. Extremely bright colors can be unpleasant or difficult to read. Also, you should avoid using the same color for the foreground and background of your ad; it will make it difficult to identify items within the image clearly.

Work With the Publisher Color Schemes

If you are manually placing your ads on certain sites, you should consider tailoring the color scheme of your display ad to match your publisher’s pages. This will make the ad look like it fits naturally on the page, rather than clashing with the content that the publisher most commonly uses. Unattractive or out of place ads will result in fewer click-throughs, therefore making you spend more on impressions with little results. It’s more important to match the sites that you’re targeting than to match the advertisement to your brand’s color scheme or landing page. For instance, a digital ad that is being placed on STLToday.com should match the red, black, white, and grey tones of their website.

Use Transparent PNG Format Images 

PNG files can greatly improve the quality and aesthetics of your digital ad, mainly because of the way it’s rendered compared to JPEGs. If you don’t have a transparent PNG image, make sure your ad color scheme matches the background of your images. If your image - logo, element, etc. - has a white background, consider using a white background for your display ad. This will ensure the best quality for compressing this file into a JPEG. 

Balance Your Ad Content

Make sure your ad text and images are balanced within the body of the display ad and within the overall ad size. It’s important to create each ad concept in all of the available sizes for the network - Google’s Display Network - in which you’re publishing the ads. Images should be clear, resized to fit the ad shape, and easy to recognize. All text should be easy to read and understandable in relation to the included images and shape and size of the ad. Images should not be cut off or unrecognizable and lines of text should be complete and make sense. Preview your ad in each available size and resize any images as needed.

Create a Visible Display URL

Your display URL should be an element of your display ad design. That means making YourSite.com displayed somewhere in the design of your ad. If your font color for the display URL is the same color as the ad’s background, then it won’t be visible to the user.

Conclusion

Mad science or not, these best practices for images, colors, and fonts in your digital ads will enhance their performance on the networks in which they’re displayed. Google’s display ad builder will allow you to easily and quickly make changes to your display ads. The builder is also a great way to do A and B testing between ad variations. Interested in digital advertising? Trying to get in front of your customers on the sites they visit? Contact us today to schedule a meeting so we can identify how your business goals fit into this digital marketing medium.