In some cases, the click is king. Pretty obvious on a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. For display advertising, clicks have been one of the major measures of success for years. Media plans estimate the number of clicks for a campaign. Media teams optimize for clicks. Clients judge the campaign on how much traffic was driven.
A big challenge for small and medium size agencies is to show the effectiveness of a display campaign without the budgets to do research along with the media buy. Companies like Dynamic Logic can provide detailed information on the effectiveness of a campaign including brand favorability, purchase intent, brand awareness and many others measures of success. All of this information is critical to the real success of a campaign. Budgets are the challenge. Some of the really targeted campaigns I’ve been working on lately have budgets that are smaller than the cost of the study.
While I have complete confidence in the effectiveness of display advertising, it can be a leap of faith on the client’s part. Reading through a presentation given by Gian Fulgoni, Chairman and Co-Founder of comScore, Inc. at the iMedia Brand Summit this year, I have pulled out some statistics that I found very interesting, and hopefully you will too.
Bye Bye Clicks
In a study by comScore, Starcom, and Tacoda in July, 2007, they found that 32% of Internet users clicked on at least one display ad during the time of the study. Just two years later (March 2009), the study revealed that number has dropped to just 16%.
Source: comScore, Inc. custom analysis, Total US Online Population, persons, July 2007 and March 2009 data periods.
Hello Relevance
What does this mean for display advertising? Is it less relevant today than it was just 2 years ago? If you look at spending levels for display advertising, you would see a different story. Advertising dollars continue to shift to display (and other digital media) from traditional media. That is because the click only tells part of the story. National and Global companies know this because they have budgets to do ad relevance studies showing the effectiveness of their media spend, which is why their display budgets continue to rise. They are constantly doing ad relevance studies, and these studies consistently show a lift.
Even when 32% of the Internet users clicked on at least one ad per month, that still means the vast majority of your impressions are served to non-clickers.
comScore’s analysis of over 200 display campaigns showed consistent lift in:
- Site visitation
- Trademark search
- Online and offline sales
They are also quick to say that many of the campaigns in the study have minimal, or no clicks at all. Notice on the chart below, that of the online lift in sales, less than 2 of the points come from clickers.
Source: Should We Really be Optimizing for Clicks? An Update of “Natural Born Clickers” comScore, Inc.
The studies are out there, and the data backs up the effectiveness of display advertising. It is, however a leap of faith for companies that cannot afford large ad effectiveness studies to go along with their campaign.
