[Infographic] Which Ad Headlines and Images Catch Your Readers’ Attention?

Every native ad has the same goal – to get the audience to engage and click through. It sounds simple, but achieving a good CTR is a challenge faced by performance marketers everywhere, every day.

As every performance marketer knows, past performance is the best predictor of future success. That’s why you spend so much time knee-deep in performance data, trying to glean insights that can help optimize every aspect of your native ad campaigns – from headline length to image size to audience targeting.

It’s one thing to analyze the data from your own ad campaigns – it’s quite another to access the performance data from a network that reaches 1 billion monthly users, worldwide.

Online ads have a limited time to grab the reader’s attention. According to some studies, and much anecdotal evidence, the average attention span is getting shorter.

The exact amount of time an ad has to capture the reader’s attention is hotly debated – some say less than 8 seconds, other claims a measly 3 seconds, and 5-6 seconds is the reported attention span of the average millennial.

Any online ad has to work hard – and fast – to compete with all the other content on the webpage. Native ads have two main visual elements that can capture a reader’s attention: the headline and image. You should make every effort to optimize the elements of your headlines and images, whether it’s word length, image size, or even how close up the image is.

And we want to help!

We’ve put our data to the test for you, comparing various combinations of headlines and images from across our network of premium publishers, to glean the best practices you can use in your own native advertising campaigns.

So, dive in and grab some takeaways. You too can capture the attention of your target audience to drive better results for your business.