At Lijit, we continually try new things to improve the end-to-end search experience for our publishers. Knowing that revenue is a key driver for some publishers, we took a hard look at how we displayed ads in search results, and experimented with a few ideas to see if we could increase ad performance. On April 30, we launched a new ad layout in our search results and asked a few of our publishers if they would try it out. With a couple weeks of data collected, the participating publishers saw an increase in the ratio of clicks to searches ranging from 10% to 300%.
What did we do, you may ask. We increased the number of ads at the top of the page from 1 ad to four. We also eliminated the yellow background of the top ad unit, and modified the text colors of the ad. If you would like to have your search results pages displayed with the new layout, please click here to let us know.
While we were under the hood, our developers made some modifications to the way the ads and search results load, resulting in a quicker overall load time for each search results page. These changes that relate to speed are already in place for all publishers, regardless of the ad layout. Because they are your search results pages, if you prefer to keep the existing layout, don’t do anything. You’ll still see the faster load times.
While we expect these changes to bring about ad performance improvements, we will continue try new things to make it even better in the future.
