Interesting Snippets

Mr. Gundotra said that any advertisement on Google that has a “social annotation” to it, specifically someone who has clicked the +1 button on an ad, is experiencing a drastic uptick in engagement.

“We are seeing 5 to 10 percent click-through-rate uplift on any ad that has a social annotation on our own Web sites,”

one of the big reasons why online advertising has done so well is simply the negative one: online micropayments were a disaster, and never took off. But they’re much more compelling as a business model, and there’s a decent chance that at some point in the future the financial system as a whole is going to get its act together and put together something which actually works and which people are happy to adopt. At which point, the online ad industry will face a major threat…
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advertisers still think that click-through rates mean something, and that a higher click-through rate means a better ad. It’s the measurement fallacy: people tend to think that what they can measure is what they want, just because they can measure it.

In fact, with very few exceptions, I’ve never even wanted to look at online ads: its quite astonishing, the degree to which we’ve collectively trained ourselves to ignore ads when we bring up a web page. And what that says to me is that online advertising is missing something really huge.

Online ad campaigns being tracked by OCR will have a Nielsen tag attached to them. If a user encounters an ad while logged into Facebook, either on the Facebook website or while surfing the web within the same browser, Facebook recognizes the encoded tag. Facebook anonymizes the ad viewership data it collects — e.g., it won’t tell Nielsen that I specifically viewed the ad, but it will add me to the group of females in my age bracket and location who viewed the ad — and send that grouped data to Nielsen.

“The results are astonishingly accurate,” Steve Hasker, Nielsen’s president of media product leadership, said in a recent interview. “This product will be directly comparable to TV ratings

on average, 30% of pre-roll ads (on YouTube) were skipped… 81% of users who viewed a full ad (either standard pre-roll or a viewed-through skippable ad) and 59% of users who viewed only the first five seconds of an ad could subsequently recognise the same ad.

Globally, print publications fetched $1 per hour of reader attention. TV got a quarter for a viewer hour. Online fetched “less than a dime.”
Why is online advertising such a poor stepchild? … The endless supply of online content means an endless supply of places where ads could go, which by definition depresses demand and, with it, price. Period.
The second problem is more basic still. Ever click on a banner ad? Have you? Ever? Of course not, because why would you leave what you’re doing—especially socializing—to go listen to a sales pitch? The click-through rate, industry-wide, is less than 1 percent

In recent job listings for the Amazon’s display advertising team, the company says:

“Amazon.com is continuing to build out its Worldwide Online Display Advertising business to tap into the growing online advertising market. Display Ads is one of Amazon’s fastest growing and most profitable businesses. We plan to build next generation advertising products by leveraging Amazon’s world-class personalization technologies, unparalleled customer data and engaging video content.”

Schacter also points out other illuminating quotes from Amazon including:

“Display Ads is one of the hottest tech sectors… Amazon is uniquely positioned to leverage our culture of customer obsession…and change the industry.”

comScore has conducted a series of ad effectiveness studies across Western Europe (Germany, UK, France, and Spain) which show that display advertising, despite a lack of clicks, can have a significant, positive impact on consumer behaviour:

Display ads lifted visitation to the advertiser’s website by 72 percent on average
Display ads increased the likelihood of consumers conducting a trademark search query using the advertiser’s branded terms by an average of 94 percent

measuring campaign effectiveness using click-through rates (CTRs) alone under-values the ability of the online channel to build brands.

Key reasons why CTRs are not the right measure to evaluate online ad effectiveness are:

In Germany, CTRs decreased by 15 percent during 2009 and were at an average of only 0.11% in December 2009
In August 2010, 85 percent of German internet users did not click on any display ad during the month and the impact of online display advertising is therefore never measured for these users by CTR
Heavy clickers, who only accounted for 3% of the total German online population, generated 62% of all clicks
Heavy clickers have very different demographics and behavioural profile from the mainstream German internet audience