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Looks vs. Results: My ugly ad got 150% more clicks than a professional design
- daniellarusso 6y agoMy best performing ads have been black backgrounds with white text, no grayscale.
- amelius 6y agoIf you target hackers, try black backgrounds and green text.
- ben174 6y agoThis might simply be performing better due to shock factor. I’d be interested in seeing how these ads would perform if they weren’t a novelty.
- anonytrary 6y agoThat's the entire point.
- Ayesh 6y agoAd blindness is real. The "professional" ad is a text book corporate ad that people often ignore.
- Finnucane 6y agoIt looks like the party invite email that you get from HR to tell you there’s leftover pizza in the break room.
- notahacker 6y agoProbably worse than most textbook corporate ads: the 'free guide' and 'read more' are too small to catch the eye, and the title is boring and generic even so even the sort of person that reads ads and is in the target audience might pass. Unsurprising the novelty ad performs better, but a better conventional one might too.
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoThat's the point
- fossuser 6y agoI'd wonder about click through vs. conversion and if there's a difference there. Might just be because of novelty factor, but also may be tricking less sophisticated users because it looks different and those users may be less likely to convert. It'd be interesting to see conversion results too.
- glangdale 6y agoYes, had the same thought. The hand-drawn one is unusual. If this strategy proliferated then it might well stop working, losing the novelty effect.
- corysama 6y agoI've seen variations of this article before. It's the novelty. "That's different... What would someone pay real money to advertise with something that looks so cheap and crappy? Click."
- H8crilA 6y agoThere were 12 (24) clicks total, you don't even have to use p-value or any other calculation to know that this result means pretty much nothing ...
- joegahona 6y agoThe author argues in the comments that it's statistically significant: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/looks-vs-results/?r=2#comment-5206984325 https://www.gkogan.co/blog/looks-vs-results/?r=2#comment-520...
- andreilys 6y agoTheir argument consists of linking an optimizely screenshot. 12 vs 24 clicks is not significant, it could’ve gone either way. Also given this minuscule sample, it’s easy to conduct p-hacking to get the desired outcome
- jonex 6y agoCould you explain the calculations that lead to the claim that the result is not significant? From what I can tell, if we assume that clicking the ad is a weighted binary variable, eg. what is modelled as a "proportional distribution" there's a statistically significant difference between the two results. It's even pretty strong at P=0.006 (per https://epitools.ausvet.com.au/ztesttwo https://epitools.ausvet.com.au/ztesttwo), but I might be missing something? In other words, if I'm doing the math right, for him to p-hack this by rerunning the experiment in the case of no difference, he'd have to run it more than 100 times to get a 50% chance of getting as good or better significance. There's of course plenty of other things that could be wrong outside of the simple statistical test, he could be making the numbers up, the groups might not be properly randomized etc.
- Reebz 6y agoThe author is using a tool designed for landing pages. The quality of the samples are going to be wildly different and that needs to be taken into account. Linkedin calculates an ad impression (last I checked) as 50% of the ad is on screen for at least 300ms. I can be scrolling as fast as my thumb will flick down my LinkedIn newsfeed and it would probably count. Then the KPI being used is clicks. I don't know of any business owner who would take that as valid. It should be some kind of conversion event (newsletter signup, contact request, or purchase, etc.) If it were up to me, I'd want 4,400 clicks and a few dozen conversion events to do my calculations on statistically significant effectiveness. Especially since the author is paying CPC (cost-per-click)... who cares about impressions at all?
- Puts 6y agoMaking people click is not the problem. People follow garbage click-bait links all the time. Design is not just about "making things look nice". It's just as much about creating identity. What does it matter if you bring users to your site if it's the wrong kind that does not convert to real customers? Seems like there's a particular type of business leaders that thinks marketing is just a numbers game.
- joegahona 6y agoYeah exactly, another thing he could've done is put a girl in a bikini or a gross pic of toenails, a la Outbrain. That'll get people to click more than a "normal" ad but only the hackiest of hacks thinks that's the ultimate goal.
- ppeetteerr 6y agoIt worked for godaddy...
- jjeaff 6y agoExactly, which is why the most garbage click bait ads you will find on the internet are for websites that make their money on advertising rather than by selling products. Because those sites are just trying to get eye balls to increase impressions and thus make more money. They don't have to worry about actually selling you a product.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- chiefalchemist 6y ago> An ad that took me 15 seconds to create had a 2.5x better clickthrough rate than one done by a paid designer. If this were an actual campaign it would mean 2.5x more sales leads or user signups at a lower acquisition cost, on top of shipping faster with less overhead. That is a false assumption. Not all clickers are equal. Not all leads are equal. More is not necessarily better. Better is better. Full stop.
- aaronbrethorst 6y agoI find the paid-for design to be uninteresting and unattractive. If you were to ask me what I'd find when I clicked through, I would say that it's likely I'd be asked to sign up for a low-quality mailing list to receive a bland white paper. The scribble version is, at least, novel. Still probably wouldn't click through, but at least it would grab my attention for a moment.
- amelius 6y agoYeah but the scribble version wears off faster, when everybody else starts copying the trick.
- aaronbrethorst 6y agoWould I rather: Use a design that costs me money to produce and doesn't work, or... Use a design that does not cost me to produce and does work, and then find something new to do when the novelty wears off? Not a tough call for me.
- amelius 6y agoSure, but that doesn't make the article's outcome universally true.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwaway2245 6y agoThe ugly scribble design is simply better design - using better design principles. It communicates the useful part (in particular, the "call to action") clearly and instantly, without distraction. There's more going into this than just the concept of writing on paper.
- Ayraa 6y agoWhat was the bounce rate, avg visit time and conversion rate (email signup) between people who came from the non-designed vs. designed ad though? A higher clickthrough rate isn't necessarily better if more of the people who came from the non-designed ad didn't do much or anything on the page and mostly clicked out of curiosity.
- ppeetteerr 6y agoI've read somewhere that porn ads and political ads perform better when they don't look professionally made. If I were a publisher, I would be very selective about the quality of the ads being displayed. I would also be in the minority since even CNN has ugly ads at the bottom of every article ("You won't believe what she looks like today!")
- cblconfederate 6y agoDigital ads used to be noticeable (because flash and gifs). Google and fb ads are bland and don't stick out, and you don't even have an option. I wonder how advertisers missed this bit, novelty used to be the desired goal in old media advertising.
- bdcravens 6y agoThe professional "design" is too busy and noisy, distracting me from title. The call to action is tiny. The "ugly" design increases the lettering to a larger % of the total graphic. A design with these changes, and graphics that are a better abstraction for the message, would likely perform much better. (tl;dr pretty design != good design)
- cecja 6y agoOne ad had a concept the other was boilerplate/template garbage. An idea is more worth than mediocre design.
- slimskim 6y agoThere's so much more to design than just aesthetics. If the intent is to grab attention or pique curiosity perhaps we can say option B is better designed than option A :)
- allenu 6y agoI can see how the ugly ad could get more clicks. It looks so different from everything else that you're naturally curious to see what it leads to. I will also add that the "professionally designed" ad is kind of busy. It has so many things going on (some text in all caps, different colors, some quoted, illustration doesn't add much value, arrows that don't mean anything) that it doesn't really catch your attention or call you to action. The "ugly" ad, however, gets to the point.
- TeeMassive 6y agoIn addition, I would be more interested in the "amateur" one because the "professional" one looks like "yet another generic corporate ad diluted to the lowest common denominator". With the hand-written one it reminds me of those YouTube tutorials that saved my butt more than one time during university.
- SilasX 6y agoI don't know, I've seen that style on Facebook ads a lot and I'm kind of numb by now to the style of "oh, look, this was hastily scrawled together, isn't that so edgy and real?"
- civilized 6y agoPersonally I'm completely numb to the "every word in a different font and some random ones on banners" style that was so inescapable in the 2010s, that it ended up on those horrible t-shirts for, like, Deranged Girlfriends Who Are Proud Gun Nuts
- vmception 6y agowait you don't realize thats a meme? there is a bot that poorly creates phrases for targeted subcultures and digitally affixes them onto T-shirt designs and makes targeted ads for them. per usual with T-shirt sites, when people purchase, the design is created on a real t-shirt at that point in time. there is a whole subreddit about the results.
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- abiogenesis 6y agoIMHO the main fallacy here is that the "professional" design is not very professional, nor good. This is basically a fight between two ugly designs.
- postalrat 6y agoHow would a good design stack up? Do you think it would have that much more than the handwritten design?
- abiogenesis 6y agoI don't know as I don't have a marketing background. Maybe it would. My point is that the article assumes that a design that costs $148 is automatically "professional" (and "good").
- Animats 6y agoRead "Oglivy on Advertising" (1983). Oglivy is one of the all-time greats in advertising. He's noted for making the original Volkswagen Beetle cool. He points out the problems of ad overdesign.
- Causality1 6y agoBy the way, your website is broken for people browsing in landscape orientation. The X to close the pop-up renders out of view.
- gk1 6y agoSorry! On mobile now (ironically) and won’t be able to fix for another week. Thank you for telling me.
- enriquto 6y agoRhodia dotted paper is lovely! Would have definitely clicked on that ad just because of that. On a second look... using a ballpoint to write on that glorious paper is a crime, so I might have hesitated a bit.
- gk1 6y agoJust a muji pen on moleskine. Innocent until proven guilty.
- cabaalis 6y agoThe first thing I read on the hand drawn version was "free guide". In the "professional" version, my mind glossed over those words completely. I don't know why, other than maybe the pretty pictures at the bottom pulled my eye away. I'll click on free.
- anonytrary 6y agoOption A doesn't stand out. It just looks like "another ad" or another component on a website. Stand out.
- insickness 6y agoIt's old news that in copywriting, copy with some misspellings typically performs better. While you may lose some who see the ad as less trustful, people respond to ads that make them feel like they've discovered something secret, new or underground.
- bichiliad 6y agoIgnoring the other points about bounce rate, brand identity, and statistical significance for a second, I think an aspect that's missed a lot is that good design accomplishes a goal. The hand-drawn ad, by this definition, stands out more than the "well-designed" one just by virtue of being visually distinct. Asking a firm to help you design an ad capaign should involve iteration, testing, and refinement as different ideas are tested on your audience. If you ask a firm to take some words and make them look good you're missing out on most of the design process.
- f430 6y agoNot only that design is a language that is used to communicate/plant imaginations in people about your brand. Sure if your product is good some industries do not care how your design looks. It's all down to the industry. If you were selling expensive water to schmucks, MS Paint simply will not suffice.
- MattGaiser 6y agoThe hand drawn one seems more authentic.
- jonnycomputer 6y agoHand drawn one was easier to read, and had fewer distractions. It also looked like what a manager might scribble down in their notes during a meeting.
- 0_gravitas 6y agoWe see this very often at where I work as well
- xupybd 6y agoUgly can be good advertising. Just have a look at https://lingscars.com https://lingscars.com Very ugly site, but impossible to forget that branding. It's my understanding they do very well.
- andai 6y agoLooks just like the stuff I find in my (physical) mailbox. A lot of Indian websites look like this too (like paper advertising leaflets).
- vgeek 6y agoThe design of this site is unconventional by today's design standards, but it has pricing clearly presented and is 100x more memorable, just like the OP's example. (As a side note, sites like this make me miss the old days of the Internet when everything was unique.) People are indifferent to car dealerships (They're all typically the same. Yes, luxo-brands will have free cookies and nicer waiting areas...), just like with insurance-- they are "boring" verticals so having something so out there works great. When you look at insurance companies, which companies have memorable marketing? Companies like Liberty Mutual with their vanilla "Save $200/year" commercials, or the Geico Gecko, "We are Farmers....", All State's Mayhem, etc.. The cheesier the better, since auto insurance is a boring, fungible product to consumers. Compare to another boring vertical like Men's Razors. They're essentially all the same. How are any of the marketing campaigns from P&G/Unilever actually differentiated enough to be memorable (ignoring the duopoly considerations)? Having unfortunately worked in marketing, everyone seems to shoot for the middle-- and they end up being bland and forgettable. Chances are, you're not going to have a super memorable marketing campaign by doing something slightly different than everyone else. The companies I've worked with where their marketing is intentionally cheesy have always had better reception than the vanilla "professional" brands.
- christiansakai 6y agoOut of novelty.
- masonlee 6y agoThis reminds me of "the most popular reddit ad ever" the "Magic Internet Money" MS Paint wizard. https://medium.com/@paulbars/magic-internet-money-how-a-reddit-ad-made-bitcoin-hit-1000-and-inspired-south-parks-art-b414ec7a5598 https://medium.com/@paulbars/magic-internet-money-how-a-redd...
- jldugger 6y agoHelp me understand this a bit -- why would a subreddit buy advertising? Is there a feedback loop or revenue share with mods? Or is this purely a ponzi thing where you buy bitcoin worth 100 bucks, spend 100 bucks on advertising and end up with the same bitcoin now worth 1000 bucks.
- biolurker1 6y agoI mean of you put a foto of an ass people would click to see wtf is going on but would never subscribe or buy software etc. Meaningless post really
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- ClumsyPilot 6y agoAre you sure they wouldn't? I am not. Some donkeys look cute
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- scoopertrooper 6y ago... and then I wrote an article about my little test and converted that into even more free clicks straight from Hacker News! Well played, sir.
- tnt128 6y agoIn the direct response world, a rule of thumb is that if an ad doesn’t look like an ad, it would perform well. This is the reason all ads on Fox News blend in look like they are articles. Ads on reddit start with TIL, amateur looking ads taken with iPhone with a talking head often beats professional ones on fb. This is also the reason drawing works better here. But, This is at the expense of eroding the brand image. over using this tactic overtime will win you the battle and lost the war.
- tomaszs 6y agoCTR is high because version B is hard to read. So more people have to visit the website to read more. It is bad because we pay for each click in CPC model. Failing to weed out uninterested people leads to increased cost of aquisition. So measuring CTR does not tell anything about if version B is better. It may be worse. To compare we'd need to check CPA with A/B testing.
- ummonk 6y agoThe first one looks like the typical ad banner that I instinctively skip over.
- sumoboy 6y agoI'll wait for the next update where 25+ pro ads and 25+ doodles were created for a better sample of success.
- bitwize 6y agoIn 1991, Bob Kaufman switched from slick ad campaigns featuring local (central Connecticut) radio celebrities to advertise his two-location furniture store chain to shooting commercials himself with whatever grotty camcorder he could get his hands on, and appearing in them himself with his face for radio and voice for print. The self-starring commercials were an enormous success, and became a meme among Connecticut viewers through the 90s, but they also got people into Bob's locations. Today, Bob's Discount Furniture has opened stores up and down the Eastern seaboard and even on the west coast, He's retired from starring as himself in his own commercials, being replaced with a puppet likeness and becoming a sort of founder-turned-mascot like Col. Sanders. But the chain's enormous success wouldn't have happened without those initial, cheaply made, cheesy ads.
- codetrotter 6y ago> An ad that took me 15 seconds to create had a 2.5x better clickthrough rate than one done by a paid designer. If this were an actual campaign it would mean 2.5x more sales leads or user signups at a lower acquisition cost, on top of shipping faster with less overhead. Are you sure about the latter? How do you know that the people that click the ugly ad weren’t just curious about what it was because of how it looked rather than what it was about?
- slumdev 6y agoIf this article gets a lot of love in the right circles, I expect we'll see hand-drawn ads for a few years--until they're not novel or rare anymore, and then the pretty ones will come back.
- TheDesolate0 6y agoYes, but your "Professional" version was ugly as fuck. It looks tacky and poorly made. I would not have clicked on it either.
- taphangum 6y agoYou don't get to talk to the prefrontal cortex without first getting past the hind-brain. It's the guardian at the gates. People are just more willing to give their attention to things that are novel. Which is of course based on context. It's also one of the reasons why I've taken to using drawings within my own blog posts [1]. I've seen time on site that is MUCH higher than industry benchmarks. [1] - https://planflow.dev/blog/how-to-get-better-at-css https://planflow.dev/blog/how-to-get-better-at-css
- dave_sid 6y agoIf you read The Boron Letters, then is is almost the same as the A pile and the B pile.
- Vanit 6y agoI'm reminded of enterprise-created videos that explain their business/products to generic "happy" music. Something different would immediately get my attention too. As other comments have pointed out, I think it's a matter of standing out, and in this case lowering the standard of quality works, but soon the novelty will be something else.
- llaolleh 6y agoI think people clicked it because it was different - not because it was ugly. The minute I see a generic ad I instantly ignore it.
- Angostura 6y agoThis reminds me somewhat of my time as a journalist in the late 1980s. Laserprinters were just becoming common and companies started sending out nicely layed out press releases, using nice typefaces. It became apparent that journalists tended to ignore them because they didn't look like new - quickly produced and hof the press. So many PR agencies went back to using double-spaced Courier.
- irjustin 6y agoThere's a lot of problems with the conclusion of the results on <$30 of total spend especially without actually selling a product when the author extrapolates to a sold product (vs actually giving a free one). But, if the goal is the download the yes this works. In large part because of why 'one weird trick' took off. It's simply different. Different causes our brain to pay more attention. The professional ad, just like all ads today are relatively ignorable because we've "seen it all" and are mostly annoyed by them. This tends to be why trends are cyclical. There are only so many things you can do with a specific medium. So, it's relatively expected that once a medium hits a certain tenure, it'll recycle on itself.
- gk1 6y agoAd spend was around $500 :)
- tqi 6y agoI think the biggest red flag for me is the large disparity in sample sizes between the two arms of the test. Unless the author purposely set up a 55-45 test for some reason, it feels like a test that was not set up correctly.
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- reilly3000 6y agoFunny story about that effect gone wrong. I was helping a university with digital ad buying in collaboration with their ad agency. I pitched the idea of using online display split tests to measure the effectiveness of messages, then use that data to help inform what messages would get printed for outdoor billboards. In online tests, an ad variation with a poorly-drawn smiley face did exceptionally well relative to the more traditional designs. The “ugly ad” that won the online tests didn’t translate well to billboards. Data is harder to obtain in that sphere, but the ad got plenty of feedback and not much of it was good. I got to see the lesson I had to learn with our clients everyday on my commute for 3 months. I won’t soon forget it.
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- fedd 6y agoI have an ad blocker in my mind that filters out any commercially looking or sounding message. not only it works on websites but in the streets for billboards, during voice phone calls and face to face conversations. the ugly ad that violates most of the ad traditions is more likely to be followed by me. (especially if it lacks the call to action part. I hate calls to action. especially when it's me who's going to pay)
- chrismcb 6y agolet's compare apps with orange. Option A is awful, no wonder if got so few clicks. It is too hard to busy and more difficult to read. B is simple and easy to read. I would have assumed B was done by the professional, because it is clear and concise while A may have been drawn by a professional artist, it wasn't done by a marketer. It seems to me, that this experiment is evidence that an easy to read ad is better than a noisy one.
- dorkwood 6y agoI think I'd rephrase this to "my interesting, hand-drawn ad got 150% more clicks than a boring, run-of-the-mill design".
- guacaswole 6y agoI like the premise of the post but you have to be transparent about your downstream funnel otherwise how can anyone be sure of the quality of the clicks? Sure Option B had around half the CPC by the looks of it but what happened next? That’s the most interesting thing of all and it’s missing from your post.
- shalmanese 6y agoIt's irrelevant whether one ad gets a better result than another ad, what matters is does any ad drive traffic at a rate cheap enough to build a sustainable business. The "ugly" ad cost $11 to drive a webpage visit. Is this enough to result in a profitable conversion? I'm guessing almost certainly not. So what does it matter if the "ugly" ad performs better? All that means is you go bankrupt slower. Is there room to improve the performance of the ugly ad so it wanders into the realm of profitability? I'm guessing there's far less room than for the professional ad and, probably, there doesn't exist a design that will drive profitability with the current offering and more focus should be made in customer development to discover and communicate a clear value prop rather than mess around with ad copy.
- moltar 6y agoThere’s a famous saying: ugly sells I’ve worked in performance advertising field enough to see this come true so many times.
- peanut_worm 6y agoWeb advertising will always be an enigma to me. I would assume that the kind of person who clicks internet ads is not an average person so it must be difficult to create a good ad.
- solarkraft 6y agoIt does look very different and thus inspires curiosity. But it wouldn't exactly inspire trust in me.