Online Advertising Effectiveness – It’s Not Just About The Click
By Anna Johnson on August 26th, 2009Click-through rates are certainly one measure of online advertising effectiveness – especially in relation to text ads – but they’re not the only measure. If the ad is designed to offer interesting content or some level of interactivity, for example, shouldn’t the time people spend viewing or interacting with the ad also indicate its effectiveness?
Well, Eyeblaster reckons it’s found a way to measure non-click based online advertising effectiveness with its concept of the ‘dwell rate’. The dwell rate is based on how much time people spend with a given ad. Dwelling includes (where applicable) time spent on mouse-overs, initiating a video, initiating the expansion of an ad, and other user-initiated custom interactions.
Measuring ad effectiveness in terms of dwell rate may just be music to many – particularly brand focused – marketers’ ears. While, according to Eyeblaster, the average worldwide click-through rate for rich media ads was 0.35 percent in 2008, the average dwell rate for those ads was a much higher 8.71 percent.
In particular, in North America expandable banners had only a 0.3 percent click-through rate, but a 7.1 percent dwell rate and an average user dwell time of over 45 seconds. Internet users in North America also spent the most time dwelling on online ads appearing in the mail category (almost 85 seconds) in 2008, with the next longest time spent on Instant messaging ads (nearly 74 seconds), and then ads in news, technology and games.
Most direct response marketers will probably still rely on clicks and actions that are further along the buy-cycle (e.g. sign-ups or sales) than a dwell rate as the ultimate measure of online ad effectiveness. Dwell rates are, nevertheless, a valid measure where the ads are an end in themselves, and therefore shouldn’t be ignored.
