• by Masha Geller , June 29, 2003

eMarketer this week is planning to release its newest report, Online Advertising Tactics, which covers trends, stats and best practices for using banners, rich media, search, sponsorships, email, and classifieds.

The report also offers detailed spending statistics to an examination of why advertisers use some formats more and others less, paints detailed picture of the search marketing field, examines the dangers of spam and other issues.

"With more format choices than ever before, effective online advertising tactics require knowing which formats to deploy, when to deploy them, and how consumers react to the various techniques of reaching them interactively," eMarketer states in the executive summary as the "bottom line" conclusion of the report.

According to the data, the share of US online advertising spending devoted to banners shrank from 46.8% in 2000 to 29.4% in 2002, a 17.4-point fall. Meanwhile, spending on keyword search (aka paid search) rose from a 1.3% share to 15.4%, or a 14.1-point gain.

The report also notes that while better tools than click-through rates exist as a measure of online advertising effectiveness, CTRs still indicate some degree of response from the online audience. eMarketer cites recent research by DoubleClick, which compared CTRs for rich media and non-rich media ads, and found a huge difference with rich media. In Q4 2002, that meant a 2.44% CTR for rich media ads versus only 0.27% for all others. Advertsing.com also found that rich media ads are more effective than static ads at motivating consumers to respond in some way.

The report also looks at search marketing and according to the data examined by eMarketer, when conducting a search, 29.22% of people worldwide use two-word phrases, according to OneStat.com. One-word and three-word search terms were about equally used at 24.76% and 24.33% of respondents, respectively. One result from an iProspect survey found that nearly half of users (48.0%) go no further than the first page of search results before clicking on a listing. This user reluctance to dig deeply into results points to why optimizing search positions is essential for most companies.

Finally, eMarketer cites a GartnerG2 consumer survey conducted last year, in which 78% of respondents cited pop-up ads as a "very annoying" online ad format. In contrast, only 43% said the same thing about interstitial ads. At the same time, the pop-ad ad accounted for 3.5% of all US online ads in Q4 2002, based on impressions, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. That number nearly doubles the previous year's figure (1.9%). In addition, Nielsen says that publishers served 13.4 billion pop-up ads in Q1 2003 (not counting house ads), a 24% increase from the previous quarter.