At the beginning of the summer, Hop Studios set up an new type of ad placement with our client Noozhawk. Their timely, seasonal Summer Fun section merged news stories about summer activities for kids, with a browsable directory of activities, camps, teams, and workshops. Traditionally speaking, this kind of content is catnip for advertisers—it’s specific, reaches people looking for information related to a specific type of service or product, and in this case, targeted parents of children who had the money to spend on their kids this summer.
We thought it was an ideal time to try a new way of presenting ads on the website.
We started with the commonly seen stack of ads down the right side of the page. At the top, you see the top ad. Scroll down a bit, there’s more content and the next couple of ads in the stack. So far, so good. But we have long been frustrated with what happens next: scroll down far enough and on pages with more content than ads—which can easily happen in a directory with a lot of entries—the right column ends up just being empty space. What a shame to lose the possibility of showing an ad in that space, space already reserved for just that purpose.
Thanks to some creative thinking and the magic of Javascript, our solution was simple: when the reader scrolls past the final ad, where white space would normally appear, we moved the first ad down to there, and then the second, the third… you get the idea. Basically, no matter how long the page was, the ads remained visible alongside the viewable content, scrolling in order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, as the page was scrolled. You get a more pleasing, symmetrical design with no white space in the right column and (most exciting for advertisers), a second or even third chance that an ad could be viewed.
It’s a neat trick we haven’t seen before, and one we think actually adds (pun intended) opportunity and convenience to the user, publisher, and advertiser.
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