Looks vs. Results: My ugly ad got 150% more clicks than a professional design

I 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.

Ignoring 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.

There 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 ...

> 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?

I 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.

What 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.

Making 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.

I 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

Funny 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.

There'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.

It does look very different and thus inspires curiosity. But it wouldn't exactly inspire trust in me.

Read "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.

You 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

Ad blindness is real. The "professional" ad is a text book corporate ad that people often ignore.

This 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-redd...

In 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.

I 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.

Ugly can be good advertising. Just have a look at https://lingscars.com

Very ugly site, but impossible to forget that branding. It's my understanding they do very well.

There'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 :)

This 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.

This 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.

> 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.

Option A doesn't stand out. It just looks like "another ad" or another component on a website. Stand out.

It'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.

I'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.

In 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.

I 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)

... 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.

I'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!")

I'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.

CTR 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.

The 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.

It'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.

Digital 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.

I 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.

If 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.

Web 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.

Rhodia 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.

let'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.

IMHO the main fallacy here is that the "professional" design is not very professional, nor good. This is basically a fight between two ugly designs.

Hand 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.

I think I'd rephrase this to "my interesting, hand-drawn ad got 150% more clicks than a boring, run-of-the-mill design".

By the way, your website is broken for people browsing in landscape orientation. The X to close the pop-up renders out of view.

I'll wait for the next update where 25+ pro ads and 25+ doodles were created for a better sample of success.

I think people clicked it because it was different - not because it was ugly.

The minute I see a generic ad I instantly ignore it.

There’s a famous saying: ugly sells

I’ve worked in performance advertising field enough to see this come true so many times.

The hand drawn one seems more authentic.

If you read The Boron Letters, then is is almost the same as the A pile and the B pile.

My best performing ads have been black backgrounds with white text, no grayscale.

The first one looks like the typical ad banner that I instinctively skip over.

We see this very often at where I work as well

The 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)

Out of novelty.