Commentary

Just an Online Minute... About Audience Loyalty

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) yesterday released a new White Paper entitled Assessing the Value of Loyal Audiences, intended to provide marketers with a better understanding of the role of various metrics in evaluating a website's advertising potential and determining its advertising value.

Putting the current flurry of online ad effectiveness research into perspective, the OPA worked with Dynamic Logic to aggregate the results of about 300 different studies into a database of MarketNorms for online advertising overall. These MartketNorms demonstrate that online advertising has a profound impact on Brand Awareness and Brand Message Association.

Going a step further, the OPA analyzed the combined results of 37 separate Dynamic Logic studies of nine different high-quality news and information sites. These combined results were used to compare the performance of ads placed on highly engaging content sites to the MarketNorms for online advertising overall.

The data show that premium, branded content sites outperform the industry norms on every available measure - more than doubling advertising impact in Unaided Awareness (27.5% lift versus 11.3% lift) and outperforming the weighted average by two-thirds on Message Association (32.6% lift versus 19.4% lift).

In addition to achieving a significant advantage in Unaided Awareness and Message Association, advertisers on these sites also experienced notable gains in Aided Awareness (5.3% lift versus 4.4% lift), Brand Favorability (1.6% lift versus 1.2% lift) and Purchase Intent (1.6% lift versus 1.5% lift) over industry norms.

OPA Executive Director Michael Zimbalist said that the research demonstrates that there is “an apparent interaction working to advertisers' advantage on sites for which visitors have high affinity and loyalty."

The OPA is currently fielding primary research to further investigate this phenomenon. We’ll keep you posted about their findings.

Next story loading loading..