Visual appearance of display ads and its effect on click through rate

One of the most important categories of online advertising is display advertising which provides publishers with significant revenue. Similar to other categories, the main goal in display advertising is to maximize user response rate for advertising campaigns, such as click through rates (CTR) or conversion rates. Previous studies have tried to optimize these parameters using objectives such as behavioral targeting. However, there is no published work so far to address the effect of the visual appearance of ads (creatives) on user response rate via a systematic data-driven approach. In this paper, we quantitatively study the relationship between the visual appearance and performance of creatives using large scale data in the world's largest display ads exchange system, RightMedia. We designed a set of 43 visual features, some of which are novel and others are inspired by related work. We extracted these features from real creatives served on RightMedia. We also designed and conducted a series of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of visual features for CTR prediction, ranking and performance classification. Based on the evaluation results, we selected a subset of features that have the highest impact on CTR. We believe that the findings presented in this paper will be very useful for the online advertising industry in designing high-performance creatives. It also provides the research community with the first ever data set, initial insights into visual appearance's effect on user response propensity, and evaluation benchmarks for further study.