I have a JD from Stanford Law School but last week I found myself outlining a banner ad strategy to test different images of women leaned over cars as a means of driving traffic to an auto site.

We launched an auto site, AutosAhora. It’s a little ugly at this stage because we’re just playing with it to test some of our hypotheses.

We’ve been advertisers – I started the business in online lead generation. We’ve enabled publishers – we run an ad network and service hundreds of publishers focused on the Hispanic market. But it wasn’t until last year that we took the plunge and became a publisher ourselves by launching some of our own sites. We know how to spend money to drive traffic to a site – paid media, search, affiliate marketing, even radio. Organic traffic, with no spend however, is a new area.

We’ve been doing a lot of experimentation. In general, we take a look at the whole funnel to understand the right combination of elements that results in the end goal whether that be a page view, lead or transaction. A good summary of our method is outlined here.

For our autos site, we have tested different sources of organic traffic: twitter, social networks, article postings (ala Digg, Reddit, etc.), and link exchanges. We have tested different article headlines, content types (video, photos, articles, tips) and content categories. We are also testing different website layouts and placements.

We’re slowly working through our hypotheses but one thing is clear, sex and autos go together. More specifically, women and cars go together. Were the Duryea brothers out to impress a girl when they created the first successful gas powered car? (Yeah, I had to look that up. I drive a 1996 Honda Civic for God’s sake!) What were Ford’s motives? I venture to guess that most men think it matters to women what type of car they drive and they think a hot car will attract a hot girl. And most auto shows, auto sites and auto magazines do nothing to disabuse them of the notion. I’ll reserve comment. Suffice it to say that most of the folks visiting auto sites are men and let’s face it, men like to look at women. And cars. So why not both?

Our testing shows that’s the combination that’s garnered the most traffic to our site thus far, by a wide margin. We don’t think this is a good long-term strategy, but if you want fast traffic to your autos site, women are the way to go. Which brings me back to my test.

Which ad below do you think won in the online U.S. Hispanic community? (By winning, I mean garnered the most clicks, highest CTR).

Do Blondes get more clicks?

Or Brunettes?

I decided on a blonde versus brunette test to see if hair color makes a difference in click through rates. We already know that the less clothing these women wear the higher the CTR, but the results here were pretty dramatic. The blonde ladies received a 0.34% CTR versus only 0.19% for brunettes. So U.S. Hispanic men prefer blondes. I could have told you that from personal experience but that’s a whole other blog.