Online advertising is where it’s at for many brands and companies, but click-thru rates are typically less than 0.1%. Knowing there was more value to online advertising than click-thru rates, comScore developed its Brand Metrix norms database, which is used to measure the “view-thru” rates of online advertising.
In short, just because a person doesn’t click on an online ad when they see it, doesn’t mean it hasn’t had some kind of effect on that person’s future behavior. The comScore Brand Metrix was created to measure that added value to online advertising, and it shows that online ad exposure is undervalued by 20% or more when only click-thru rate is used to determine the impact of an online ad.
Check out some of the statistics from the comScore Brand Metrix below, which show the impact of online ad view-thru rates on consumer behavior:
- Sales lift: 27% for online sales and 17% for offline sales
- Advertiser’s site visitation lift: 65% in the week following first ad exposure and 46% in weeks 1-4 after first ad exposure
- Advertiser’s branded trademark search lift: 52% in the week following first ad exposure and 38% in weeks 1-4 after first ad exposure
Based on these findings from the comScore Brand Metrix, online search advertising view-thru rate is a critical piece to the online advertising strategy puzzle. If these statistics are accurate, then the value of online advertising is much greater than anyone thought (or at least greater than what marketers could convince the executive team of when asking for a bigger online marketing budget).
Next time you head into a meeting with the execs to set your online marketing budget, bring the statistics from the comScore Brand Metrix with you. Finally, you’ll have something to point to that quantifies the value of online advertising in a way other than click-thru rate.
Image: Flickr
Susan Gunelius is the author of 10 marketing, social media, branding, copywriting, and technology books, and she is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She also owns Women on Business, an award-wining blog for business women. She is a featured columnist for Entrepreneur.com and Forbes.com, and her marketing-related articles have appeared on websites such as MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, TodayShow.com, and more.
She has over 20 years of experience in the marketing field having spent the first decade of her career directing marketing programs for some of the largest companies in the world, including divisions of AT&T and HSBC. Today, her clients include large and small companies around the world and household brands like Citigroup, Cox Communications, Intuit, and more. Susan is frequently interviewed about marketing and branding by television, radio, print, and online media organizations, and she speaks about these topics at events around the world. You can connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+.
WrapMail has 8-10% click-trough rates, why?
Companies seem to ignore the single largest online branding/advertising venue available: their own regular external emails. Why not use these emails to market the senders company?
You have a website.
You send emails.
Why not multiply your sales-staff by “wrapping” the regular email in an interactive letterhead?
No other marketing or advertising medium is as targeted as an email between people that know each other (as opposed to mass emails). These emails are always read and typically kept.
I agree with Rolv. E-mails are a great way to get new business, and market to existing clients!