• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, March 3, 2015

PointRoll, a Gannett company, has released its 2014 benchmarks report. Over 100 billion ad impressions -- which were both programmatically and traditionally traded -- were analyzed for the report, which intends to “explore the ways that advertisers successfully piqued the interest of their target audiences.”

Among PointRoll’s finds: Retail ads were watched to completion more than any other vertical, users engaged with mobile ads more often than desktop ads, interactive in-stream ads were the most engaging of all formats and the travel vertical had the highest rate of viewable impressions.

PointRoll found that consumers are almost twice as likely to finish a video to completion when it’s an in-stream unit, compared to a rich media unit with video. Nearly three-fourths (73.6%) of in-stream video ads were completed last year, per PointRoll, compared to 38.3% of rich media units containing video.

In-stream videos also drew more interaction. Interaction rates for in-stream video was 4.11% last year, compared to 1.26% for rich media and 0.73% for mobile rich media. In-stream video ads (0.62%) also had a six times higher click-through rate than flash (0.09%), and a 2.8 times higher click-through rate than rich media (0.17%).

“Incorporating video into an ad unit remains one of the most reliable ways to grab, and keep, the attention of your online audience. A larger fraction of users watched a video to 100% completion than the previous year,” writes PointRoll in the report.