Display Advertising Engagement on the Rise

The swift and steady decline of industry click-thru rates over the years has represented (to some), the supposed death knell of display advertising. However, in spite of the fact that fewer people are clicking on ads, online visitors are actually spending more time with display ads than ever before.

After examining monthly average view times for the 27.5 billion impressions served over the past year on the Collective Network® (see chart below), we observed ever increasing view times since the middle of 2009. In July alone, average view time increased 8% over the previous month; an additional 2.6 seconds per ad to 34.6 seconds. 

We believe that this increase was driven by increased interest in automotive advertising due, we suspect, to the government’s Cash For Clunkers program, as well as by travel advertisers (due to the onset of the summer travel season).

This trend continued through the year and into January 2010, where the average view time was up 16% over the same month a year ago.

What’s even more compelling is that for every month in the past year, the average view time for a display ad on Collective was above 30 seconds. In other words, even if an online visitor doesn’t click on the ad, they are still exposed to the average online ad longer than the viewer who is watching the average TV ad!

Engaging vs. Clicking

Let’s now examine interaction rate, which is defined as the following:

Interaction rate = number of instances where a user interacted with an ad / number of ad impressions served.

Collective has the ability to measure a users’ mouse-over activity on any display ad (not just rich media). This activity can be used as a proxy for a user’s eye movement across a Webpage.

An analysis of interaction rate and CTR data from the billions of impressions run on the Collective Network® in 2009 shows that online visitors were 121 times more likely to interact with ads than click on them (see Chart below).

A similar, though far less pronounced disparity between interaction rate and CTR was seen in research from Eyeblaster and DoubleClick. During its period of analysis, Eyeblaster demonstrated an 8.71% interaction rate. That is, on average, users exposed to Eyeblaster ads interacted with almost 9 of every hundred ads served, but clicked on only 3 1/2 of every thousand. This represents a difference of 25 times the CTR. Doubleclick exhibited similar results, with an interaction rate 21 times higher than its CTR.

Implications

At the end of the day, advertisers want to know that their messages are being seen and by the right audiences at the right times. And from the findings we’ve detailed here, the strong interaction rates and rising view times expressed on the Collective Network, online display ads are providing marketing benefits beyond CTR.

This is further proof that (to paraphrase Mark Twain) the rumors of the death of the display ad have been greatly exaggerated.