• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 22, 2013

Understanding how a brand's online campaign competes with competitors requires trending benchmark data like engagement rates or video completion rates across formats or regions. Relying on others to access the data or having to wait for it could mean a failed campaign.

Google introduced a tool Wednesday that allows brand marketers and agencies to pull up-to-date industry benchmarks to help plan and measure the success of display campaigns.

In the past, DoubleClick published a yearly report of these benchmarks, but now the self-serve tool enables marketers and agencies to run their own, any time. The report provides data such as interaction rates, average time spent and expansion rates for rich media. It also analyzes click-through rates per impressions, and standard media such as images and Flash.

The tool also provides insights for video completion rates, average display time, and average expansion time. Marketers can also view the data by country, vertical, ad size and ad format, or as a map, data snapshot, or trends.

Video completion rates have grown about 24% since last summer, according to Google's benchmark research. Today, when someone begins playing a video, that video plays to completion more than 60% of the time.

Clicks and interaction rates correlate strongly with ad size. The larger the ad, the more people will interact, according to Google. The tool identified that overall rich media engagement metrics continue to rise, when looking at trending data from the summer 2012 through May 2013. Compared with last summer, people interact with ads about 50% to 60% more frequently and spend between 20% and 30% more time interacting with them.

Depending on the campaign goal, some rich media formats may work better than others. Expanding ads seem to more actively get people to interact, while in-page formats are better at getting people to interact for longer amounts of time, according to Google.