Commentary

Viewing Through vs. Clicking Produced More Conversions

Viewing Through vs. Clicking Produced More Conversions

Doug Knopper, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Ad Management, said "The DoubleClick second quarter ad serving data confirms the idea that online advertising... has both direct and in-direct response potential. As advertisers... take greater advantage of advanced targeting or high-impact rich media, we should only see even stronger performance from the medium."

The ad serving trend report shows that the average click-through rates for all ads served by both advertisers and publishers were stable Q1 to Q2 at 0.56% but this was a decline of 17% year over year. In terms of ad sizes used, leaderboards continue to challenge the banner, growing 384% year over year.

Rich media increased to over 42% of all ads served in Q2 of 2004. Growth was flat Q2 over Q1, however, which could indicate a maturing of the market for rich media or perhaps a seasonal effect.

Of all ads served by publishers (where most all of the targeting is done) 53.4% are targeted by keyword/key value, which is the term for how a publisher tags a page so that ads can be contextually served to it.

Technological forms of targeting, such as by browser type, time of day, ISP, domain or operating system targeting all account for less than 2% of all publisher served ads. While usage of geo-targeting has gone down online over the past year (7.4% of all publisher inventory in Q2 '03 to 1.8% in Q2 '04) geo-targeting is improving and represents an untapped opportunity.

The Q2 Ad Serving Trend Report showed that post-impression activity rates (actions taken after viewing but not clicking on an ad) are typically higher than click-through rates. In Q2, the average click-through rate for ads served by advertisers was 0.43% as compared to an average view-through rate of 0.73%.

According to the subset of ads served by advertisers that tracked response through to online conversion, in Q2 more than six times the number of conversions resulted from view-through rather than click-through activity.

View-Through vs. Click-Through Rates for Online Advertising

View-ThroughClick-Through
2003
Q1.61%.62%
Q2.63.52
Q3.77.54
Q4.75.54
2004
Q1.59.48
Q2.73.43

Source: Doubleclick, July 2004

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