i-d media london

The effectiveness of online display ads has always been a discussions point. Many of us consider display ads to be ineffective outside of very niche situations, in the same way that PPC only becomes viable for certain products or services. This situation is book ended by the fact that viewers are deserting TV and magazine advertising is falling through the floor. Many more brands and forward thinking marketing professionals are seeing the erosion of advertising in it’s current state in favour of brands as experiences and brands as participants not as projectors of message.

So, back to online display advertising. Comscore has recently produced a whitepaper entitled ‘How Online Advertising Works: Whither The Click?’, discussing the merits of online measurement – the click versus the view – and it’s well worth a read.

Some highlight facts from the front:

• According to Doubleclick and eMarketer, click-rates on static display ads fell dramatically in recent years to average levels of only 0.2% in 2006
• Rich media ads don’t perform much better, with a click-through rate of roughly only 1% in 2006, according to research from Doubleclick, eMarketer, Eyeblaster and ABI.
• Recent research conducted by comScore on behalf of Starcom and Tacoda showed that average click rates on display ads in 2008 were less than 0.1%.
• Further Starcom research suggests no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and shows no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked.
• The research suggests that when digital campaigns have a branding objective, optimizing for high click rates does not necessarily improve campaign performance.
• The comScore research also revealed that two-thirds of Internet users do not click on any display ads over the course of a month and that only 16% of Internet users account for 80% of all clicks. comScore’s research also showed that the demographics of clickers are skewed towards younger users aged 25 to 44 earning less than $40,000 per year. This is hardly an attractive target segment for most advertisers.
• Even search ads, presumably the most effective form of online marketing, are only clicked on 4% of the time at Google, and 2% at MSN and Yahoo!, according to comScore statistics.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 11:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.