I’ve been tracking some really interesting data from our advertisers recently. I sent some information to a group of sidebar advertisers whose ads weren’t performing as well as the average, with some tips on how to change their image to one that performed better.
On average, I found that ads that showed a couple being romantic (rather than staring straight at the camera or something else) had a 17% higher click-through rate (CTR). Ads that were sized incorrectly (like you couldn’t really tell what the image was) got 63% less CTR than average. Ads that showed two women had a 38% higher average CTR.
After the advertisers sent in their updated ads, we also found that ads that switched from not showing an LGBT couple to showing an LGBT couple had an average 76% higher CTR.
Vendors, keep this in mind when you’re working with and marketing to LGBT couples! One of the things we hear over and over again is that vendors really need to show pictures of LGBT couples on their website, and this rings true with our sidebar ads as well.
Thanks for sharing this info, Lara! I had noticed the difference with the sidebars ads, and they had definitely caught my eye more!
I’m curious if the higher click through rate of ad with two women is proportional to your readership? (Do you have any data on that?)
I personally tend to click on ads with two men because demonstrative experience with male* couples is really important to me. (We had one potential site vendor with a ton of same-gender wedding experience, but it was exclusively the L/B of the alphabet soup and they seemed rather squicky about a gay men getting married (and then others, just clueless and fumbly about what they might call something when there’s no bride in the bridal party).
*gendered language is messy. I mean each in the most inclusive possible way.
That’s not at all to say that the side-bars shouldn’t cater to what works and gets responses. Just a question with a bit of personal perspective on that data.
It AMAZES me how few LGBT couples are featured on so-called LGBT-friendly sites. For me, if I see a photographer on SYE and click-through to find a site that doesn’t feature even ONE visibly LGBT couple, then I’m not choosing that photographer. Don’t cater to me on this site and then make me feel invisible on your site.
Sarah – trust that vendors who have worked with LGBT couples definitely show it on their sites :) There are still plenty of vendors who are LGBT-friendly but are brand new to weddings and haven’t yet worked with an LGBT couple! To us, LGBT-friendly is using inclusive language (non-heteronormative language) and actively participating in or supporting the LGBT community. We have a really thorough vetting process to make sure that the vendors on this site really are walking the walk, even if they haven’t had the opportunity to work with an LGBT couple yet!
As one of the vendors Lara’s talking about (there we are, over on the right), I’d like to thank Lara for getting in touch with us to improve our ad — few places that accept advertising take that kind of care of their advertisers, and we really appreciate it.
I’d also like to back up her point: before we changed the ad, we had next to no clicks at all. Since then, we’re getting a steady stream. Hurrah!
We ended up using an image of two men, at least partly because we need to resort to stock libraries for most of the photos we use, either in ads or on the site itself. This revealed something: stock photo libraries suck at providing images of lesbian couples that don’t seem totally contrived. For example: http://istockpho.to/pctNHZ — to me, this photo seems targeted at, shall we say, a rather different demographic from the one it’s intended to portray…
Great to know, even tho I’m not an advertiser. I would love to have all my clients be same-sex, but right now in Florida, that just isn’t possible… so I post my portfolio in order of when they are released. Although my same-sex wedding film that you featured has hit 63k views!