Aiming to expand reporting beyond the click, Collective Media has added the ability for customers of its AMP display ad platform to track interaction and exposure in addition to standard
performance metrics.
That means ad networks powered by the AMP system can now provide more detailed data on how users interacted with ads, mouse-over activity, how long ads were viewed and
whether they were actually viewable in the browser. While these more in-depth measurements have long been available for rich media ads, Collective says it's now bringing them to more common
Flash-based ads as well.
"These metrics apply to all ad impressions, not just rich media," said Joe Apprendi, CEO of Collective, whose AMP platform allows advertisers, publishers and agencies
to target specific audiences and manage existing ad networks.
Since only a tiny fraction of Internet users click on ads, advertisers increasingly look to other ways of figuring out whether
campaigns are working or not. "Today, 99.92% of online ads don't get clicked, so standardizing core metrics beyond click-through rates gives advertisers a clearer understanding of effectiveness on all
impressions," said Apprendi.
Collective has been offering the engagement metrics for about the last year on its own proprietary ad network but is now rolling out the new reporting features to
its 20 AMP clients including newspaper consortium newspaper online ad network quadrantONE, IDG TechNetwork, Internet Broadcasting and LinkedIn.
He added that clients would also benefit from data
Collective has gathered in the last year from the engagement reporting across multiple campaigns. That might include research on interaction rates for automotive compared to financial ads or how
branding campaigns performed compared to direct marketing efforts across the same interaction metrics.
Apprendi noted, for example, that even though not all ads run above-the-fold, there's a
good chance they'll still be seen as users move down a page. "When we launched this capability, we were surprised to find that people do in fact scroll up and down, so an ad that's not 100% viewable
in the page initially becomes 100% viewable."
A 2008 study by Marketing Sherpa, though, found that below-the-fold units are at best visible to about 70% of viewers, but only about a quarter of
them actually see the ads. With the new AMP metrics, marketers should be able to figure out for themselves whether their ads are actually being seen.