• by Dale Chaney , June 21, 2002

Is the branding impact of Internet advertising greater than you think? In its recent “First Quarter 2000 Online Advertising Report,” AdKnowledge, an online advertising research and planning firm, measured conversions (purchases or other actions taken on an online ad). The conversions were broken into three sources: post-click users—those who clicked-through on an ad and took desired action; post-impression users—those who viewed an ad but did not click; and repeat users—those who had already taken a desired action.

The big surprise? Thirty-two percent of conversions came from users who viewed an ad but did not click, compared with 24 percent of conversions that came from users who clicked through on an ad. The other 44 percent came from repeat conversions. The meaning, according to AdKnowledge, is clear: online advertising has branding impact—and click-throughs may not be the end-all some believe.

“We tend to think that post-impression conversion has a lot to do with branding,” says Michele Schott, AdKnowledge’s director of marketing communications. “We need to do more study to determine if there is, in fact, a direct cause and effect.”

AdKnowledge concedes they cannot be certain that an ad was actually “viewed” by the person who visited the page on which the ad appeared. Their statistic centers more on the fact that an ad was “served” to a browser—when the browser visited the page. A cookie is attached when the browser is served the ad. (A click-through is not required.) Then, when the browser goes to the advertiser’s site at some later time and completes the conversion, Adknowledge can label it a post-impression conversion.

In fact, the person may have totally ignored the online ad. Nor does Adknowledge discount the notion that a person—after ignoring the online ad—could have been prompted by, say, a highway billboard to go to a website.

“However, we’ve seen the same result in other studies we’ve done for individual clients. Coupled with these results, we believe the finding in this study is more than just mere coincidence. It seems to point in the direction that there is a cause-and-effect relationship,” Schott says. The question, then, is the nature of the relationship. Is it based on frequency or recency? That is, do users act because they recently saw the ad, or because they saw it repeatedly? “Once we know this,” Schott says, “then we can agree that there is a brand impact and began to quantify it.”

The sites and networks in the AdKnowledge System are representative of the web advertising marketplace. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, the Web-wide reach of the sites and networks tracked by AdKnowledge is 95.85 percent of the home audience and 98.42 percent of the work audience.

The OAR Q1 study that reported the possible connection between ads and branding is based on 150 million impressions.

“We believe this is sufficient to be statistically valid,” Schott says. “This involved several campaigns across multiple advertisers. And, we’ve done similar studies for individual clients, with very similar results. So, we think the results for the Q1 report are right on track.”

Freelance writer Dale Chaney can be reached at Dale_Chaney@msn.com.