Recent Tidbits: Online Advertising Blogs

Just catching up on a slew of posts from blogs that cover the online ad space. Here are some tidbits that caught my eye.

Interesting comment from a recent Adotas blog post regarding targeting people instead of pages:

In a recent eMarketer study, 90% of advertisers said they plan to use ad networks in the coming year and the top two factors that they will use to differentiate networks were the quality of inventory and the audience targeting. Networks that have quality inventory and rich audience targeting capabilities should be some of the first places marketers and agencies look in 2009 and beyond to keep revenues flowing at lower costs and greater efficiency.

From Fred Wilson summarizing the comScore whitepaper on the unseen benefits of display advertising, compared to search:

It’s clear that display advertising, despite a lack of clicks, can have a significant positive impact on:
- Visitation to the advertiser’s Web site (lift of at least 46% over a four week period)
- The likelihood of consumers conducting a search query using the advertiser’s branded terms  (a lift of at least 38% over a four week period)
- Consumers’ likelihood of buying the advertised brand online (an average 27% lift in online sales)
- Consumers’ likelihood of buying at the advertiser’s retail store (an average lift of 17%) 

The whitepaper also reminded readers that while search advertising was far more effective than display, display ads have 10x the reach that search ads do. I've pointed out before the difference in volume  and eCPM rates of search vs display advertising and comScore points out that marketers ought to utilize both for maximum effectiveness.

I also noted in the comments two specific quotes from Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman:

• Ffour independent studies (one of them conducted by comScore) have now shown that at least 30% of Internet users delete their cookies in a month.
• Average click through rates on display ads have dropped to under 0.1%

Comments

[Brad Hefta-Gaub]

Great stats... what's your take on this? How do you see it impacting Others Online?

[Jordan Mitchell]

Hi Brad, thx for stopping by!

As for the cookie deletion stat, seems a bit high so I'm surprised. We use cookies but it doesn't impact profile breadth as much as it does profile depth. It also highlights the necessity to work with trusted Web sites and offer users 100% transparency and control.

As for CTR, it doesn't affect us, but it does affect advertisers' perceptions of campaign success.

I think it's interesting how display advertising is under debate, even though other media forms (tv, radio, print, billboard, etc.) have no comparable measurements (impressions, uniques, clicks, conversions, etc.)!