We’re witnessing a massive transformation of advertising technologies. Advertisers modify their marketing strategies, adjust new ad placement approaches, and maximize ROI with new ad formats. 

Brands are no longer chaotically placing banners throughout websites. Instead, they embrace interstitials, rewarded videos, and expandable ads, achieving the desired effect without harming the user experience. 

According to a survey we conducted, brands are trying to align the revenue generation with an ad campaign stage, the device platform and core website usability. 

In three months, a wide array of ad formats, types and sizes has been analyzed, as were inspected impressions served through the platform and the way each influenced the campaign effectiveness in general.

Cross-platform ads are better ROI-makers

Here are the key findings:

• Advertisers who use different ad formats on different device platforms obtain higher ROI than those who stick only to one format and platform. For instance, displaying campaigns across mobile and desktop platforms is a tactic that elicits 20% higher ROI than serving impressions solely on a PC.

• On average, it takes two additional ad types to add to the overall ad spend to increase advertisers’ ROI by 70%.

• The massive investment in one format may eliminate the returns and cause the effectiveness of the ad campaign to decline.

• Interstitials, expandable, video, and native ads are among the best-performing ad formats, generating the highest click-through rates in 2017. They are on track to maintain that rate in 2018.

Effectiveness by format and size

Collected statistics also helped to determine the key click-through rates for the featured ad formats and define the best ad sizes that generate better views and CTRs. This way, native ads gained (10.4%), thehighest CTR among all ad formats, followed by full-screen interstitials (5-7%), video (1.7%), and expandable ads (1.2%).

Large rectangle (36*280), medium (300*250), leaderboard 728*90, half-page (300*600), and large mobile banner (320*100) sizes appear to be among most effective. However, in selecting the ad size, advertisers also based their decisions on standards applied within certain ad formats.

The geo analysis has shown that there may be significant disparities in the effectiveness rates, according to the countries where the ads were served.

Thus, the average CTR for video ads sometimes shows fluctuations. While scoring globally at 1.7%, in the Middle East, it showed the highest (5.9%) and lowest (0.3%) rates in North America during the period. The other example, the CTR rate of expandable rich media banner ads, reached peak highest rate in Latin America (1.2%) while in Australia and New Zealand, the bar sometimes was only as high as 0.1%.

Creative matters 

As ad tech matures, new formats appear on the scene, and the old ones lose their effectiveness. In order to adapt to the ever-changing ad landscape, it is essential to give the user experience to the highest priority and think ahead to what will complement website usability. Luckily, today’s publishers and advertisers can plan and analyze campaign effectiveness and apply different ad types for different campaigns using ad buying platforms.