Ad Performance by Conversion Action: Do Developers Like Ebooks?

David Fischer
Ad Performance by Conversion Action: Do Developers Like Ebooks?
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Historically, we've dissuaded advertisers from linking to ebooks and webinars, especially gated ones, because they tend to have a lower click-through rate (CTR) and advertisers have told us they don't convert as well. While CTOs and marketers may read ebooks at a higher rate, developers and individual contributors, who make up the bulk of our ad network don't seem to like them as much.

Ad landing pages vary by the type of conversion the marketer is looking for whether signing up for a free trial, putting in a credit card or filling out a lead form for a resource like a webinar. The ad itself primes visitors on what to expect on the landing page, with terms like "start free", "free ebook", "learn more", or "sign up". In the rest of this post, we aim to back up our guidance with hard data from our own ad network on what types of ad conversions work best for developers.

Types of ad conversions

A few months back, we created guide to the kind of ad images that performed best across EthicalAds and we saw that text-heavy ad images were among the lowest performers. This time, we categorized all the ads shown on EthicalAds for the last month by the desired marketing action and compared it with the click-through rate.

  • Signup form: The ad linked to a page where a form was the primary above the fold action, generally with a free trial.
  • Product page: The ad linked directly to a landing or product page on the advertiser's website
  • Homepage: The ad linked to the advertiser's main home page. In the cases where this works well, the homepage is probably very similar to a product page such as for an advertiser who sells a single product.
  • Public resource: The ad linked to a public resource the advertiser created like an ebook, a video, or the product documentation.
  • Gated resource: The ad linked to a lead-gated resource like an ebook or webinar but the visitor was required to submit their name and email to get access.
  • Blog: The ad linked to a blog post explaining a product or a feature of the advertiser's product. Arguably, this is similar to public resource, but we broke it out despite some sample size issues.

Across our network, this was about 23 million paid ad impressions and about 32,000 paid clicks and each conversion type except for Blogs had at least one million impressions in the month of data.

Ad CTR by Conversion Type (Sept-Oct 2024)

Ad CTR by Conversion Type (Sept-Oct 2024)

Developers don't want to read your ebook

OK, the headline on this section is perhaps a little too strong. However, I think it's fair to say after looking at the data that developers on our network do not want to read ebooks especially lead-gated ones. Tailoring ad campaigns to developers is an important part of making sure ads perform well.

Everyone is busy and developers are no exception. However, developers are interested in reading about products and services that solve their problems. While some takeaways that the data points to may be specific to EthicalAds, some of this is going to apply to anybody doing developer marketing:

  • Developers are much more willing to give their email for a product trial or a free tier than they are for gated content like an ebook or webinar.
  • Taking a developer directly to a product landing page or homepage when they click on an ad is fine especially if the page's primary target audience is already developers.
  • For developer resources like webinars or ebooks, make sure this content is public and doesn't require a signup. A call to action of "signup" that isn't for a free trial is likely a red flag.

We want your campaign to succeed

One thing that separates a niche network like us from the huge ad players, is that advertisers are always a quick email away from reaching a real person who knows developer marketing and can offer a little assistance in running a successful campaign.

If you need help with your campaign, your landing pages, or ads themselves, don't hesitate to get in touch. We may be a small team, but we've run a lot of campaigns for our advertisers and learned tricks and best practices to help you get the most out of your next campaign


Tagged with: advertisers marketing data-exploration

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