Recent studies show that consumers spend 40% of their media time online making online advertising an ideal place to deliver brand messages. However, in the past we have used only one metric to measure online advertising…clicks. We were wrong!
The Online Publishers Association, OPA, released a study today that assessed 80 of the largest consumer websites. over a month’s time analyzing consumer behaviors of those Internet users who were exposed to display advertising. “The Silent Click” measured three consumer actions:
- Searches conducted related to the advertisers’ brands
- Site visitation, the traffic driven to the advertisers’ site
- Consumer spending, the e-commerce transactions related to the advertisers’ brands
For consumers exposed to brand display ad campaigns, the research found that:
- One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites
- Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages
- Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands
- Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites
“To date, measuring a brand campaign meant relying on the click, a metric more appropriate for direct response advertising. In order to understand the value of the audiences that display advertising attracts, the study helps marketers think about real behavioral measures designed to move the needle,” said Pam Horan, president of the Online Publishers Association. “The findings suggest that measuring consumers exposed to an advertiser message in terms of their search activities associated with that brand, their visitation to the advertisers’ site and finally their e-commerce and retail spending activities, is a smart formula for getting an important view into display ad effectiveness.”
To understand if the environment that the advertising appears in has an impact on its effectiveness and more importantly the characteristics of the audiences that the different environments attract, the study found that high quality sites delivered a better response and a higher consumer spend. The results continue to reinforce why environment matters and how the brand halo effect is furthered among high quality trusted content sites.
2 Comments
July 7, 2009 at 11:10 pm
[...] movement to better measure display ads is picking up steam. The June OPA and comScore study, called “The Silent Click: Building Brands Online,” attempted to loosen the grip of click-throughs as a measurement of ad success online. And [...]
August 10, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Hi Dennis – Totally true. Although, it can measure direct response and creative influence, the click is certainly not the only thing to keep an eye on. We concentrate on visits after ad impression and then break it down further from there. My clients are seeing nearly as good of a post-impression visit per impression rate as post-click per impression rate. At the end of the day it’s all about media dollar spent per key page visit – whether they come from a click or an impression is not nearly as important.