ComScore: Most Clicks Come From 'Natural Born Clickers'
- by Gavin O'Malley @mp_gavin, October 1, 2009
It's time for online marketers to forgo click-through rates for a better measure of success, according to new data from comScore in conjunction with media agency Starcom USA and behavioral targeting firm Tacoda.
Indeed, the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen, from 32% of Web users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009. Worse still, an even smaller core of consumers -- representing just 8% of the Internet user base -- accounts for the vast majority, or 85%, of all clicks.
"Marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don't click on an ad," said Linda Anderson, comScore VP of marketing solutions and author of the "Natural Born Clickers" study. "That's precisely the wrong thing to do."
Rather, as comScore research has shown, marketers need to embrace the fact that non-clicked ads can also have a significant impact on consumers.
"Savvy marketers are moving to an evaluation of the impact that all ad impressions -- whether clicked or not -- have on consumer behavior, mirroring the manner in which traditional advertising has been measured for decades using reach and frequency metrics," Anderson added.
The original "Natural Born Clickers" study, conducted using July 2007 comScore data, showed that 32% of Internet users clicked on at least one display ad during the month.
These "clickers" were segmented into heavy, moderate and light clicking segments based on the group of users accounting for the top 50% of clicks (heavy), middle 30% (moderate), and bottom 20% (light).
In 2007, comScore, Starcom and Tacoda found that heavy clickers represented 6% of U.S. Internet users, moderate clickers accounted for 10% and light clickers accounted for 16%.
By March 2009, those numbers had dropped substantially in each case, to 4% of Internet users for heavy clickers, 4% for moderate clickers and 8% for light clickers.
Good stuff, but it left me wanting more!
I thought MediaPost just wrote an article on Wednesday or Thursday that AOL was trying to get rid of the Tacoda name and bundle everything as AOL Advertising. Yet this morning's article references Tacoda about 3 times. Regardless, CTR's have been deteriorating for years, but didn't know the Pareto principle of 80/20 was leaning more towards 90/10.
Sorry, this one felt like a big "Duh"... are we supposed to be driving conversions ... in whatever form that may be for your company???
That would be aren't we ... sorry for the typo!
Back in the day, we used to remind our favorite advertisers that "only prisoners and shut-ins fill out reader-service cards." And this was when a full-page ad in our magazine (Teleconnect) was routinely pulling 300-500 RSC inquiries -- there was still a raft of advertisers excited by these numbers (and we were perfectly happy to take their money, natch).
Nobody that any advertiser might remotely care about reaching has ever clicked on an online ad. Further, nobody that any advertiser might remotely care about reaching has ever 'engaged' with a trivial flat-web engagement mechanism like a casual game, Facebook fan-page or Twitter feed.
The inescapable conclusion is that only three things really work: 1) genuine tools (i.e., a website or an iPhone app that actually does something useful, with which a brand can be associated); 2) product placement and viral association (i.e., a way of attaching a brand to superior content); 3) authentic deep engagement (i.e., using virtual events, online realtime media, etc. to actually communicate with people).
I also thought this was good stuff and want more.
We have heard research before about the effectiveness of online can last up to 4 weeks (or longer)after seeing the ad when the user may not have clicked on the ad initially but have gone directly to the web site or searched. This totally backs overall impressions as mentioned in this article.
I was hoping updated information on this trend was coming next... to further back communicating the impressions generated...??