Red-Hot and Ice-Cold Web Ads: The Influence of Web Ads’ Warm and Cool Colors on Click-Through Rates

A field study compared the click-through rates of box and banner web ads with red and blue color schemes using data from more than 1.5 million ad impressions from 12 months of traffic on a popular news website. For box ads, a red (versus blue) color scheme generated substantially higher click-through rates, but for banner ads the effect of color was less pronounced. Consistent with research on color and attention, ads with a red color scheme elicited a greater number of responses. This finding also suggests, though, that habituation to certain types of ads, such as banner ads, can attenuate the effect of ad attributes.