The View-Through Part II

Nov 29, 2008 by Mark Maier

10 days ago we posted some very interesting information on view-throughs and how they impact online and offline Return on Interactive Investment (Luce Performance Group and Castanet.net are currently testing a formula to measure that very thing, it quantifies both the return on click-throughs and branding for any Interactive campaign).  This past week The Center For Media Research released additional research in a  summary of the press release from Comscore called "Click-Through plus View Through Completes ROI Measurement"....

 

Lift in Retailers? Online and Offline Sales among Internet Users Exposed to Display Ads Total U.S. ? Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore Brand Metrix, Norms Database
	Monthly Sales ($) per Thousand Exposed Consumers
	Control	Test	Lift
Online Sales	$994	$1,263	27%
Offline Sales	$9,905	$11,550	17%

?In an environment where proving the effectiveness of every advertising dollar is essential, comScore Brand Metrix gives marketers and publishers the ammunition to demonstrate the true value of their online advertising efforts,? said Evan Neufeld, comScore vice president of advertising solutions. ?With online display ads yielding click-thru rates of less than 0.1 percent, advertisers can no longer rely on click-thrus to gauge online ad performance. Doing so fails to capture the impact of advertising impressions ? or view-thru ? on attitude and future behavior, which are essential metrics in assessing the complete return on an investment in online advertising.?

"ComScore Brand Metrix relies on the comScore panel to parse differences in behavior and attitudes among those consumers exposed to an online ad campaign compared to those who are not exposed. It is the first product in the industry to measure the true impact of online ad exposures because it overcomes the deleterious impact of cookie deletion that other services ignore, and which can lead to an understatement of the actual view-thru impact of online ads by a factor of 20 percent or more."

"Online advertising offers a very compelling value proposition because it gives marketers a bigger bang for their buck,? added Neufeld. ?Not only does online marketing have the benefits of more attractive advertising rates and a faster growing retail channel, but it?s clear from the results of our studies that Internet marketing also generates incremental sales in retail stores.?

"The comScore norms data provide compelling empirical support for the belief that there is a quantifiable view-thru impact of online ad exposures on brand value and sales. For the studies in which both retailers? online and offline sales were analyzed, for periods ranging from two weeks to three months after the initial exposure to an online display ad, the incremental online sales lift was 27 percent and offline sales lift was 17 percent"
 
"Online ad exposures also yield a lift in various important online behaviors, such as brand site visitation and trademark searches. For example, a substantial lift in visitation to the advertiser?s Web sites can be observed in the weeks following an exposure to a display ad, even though click rates are less than 0.1 percent. Specifically, there was a 65 percent increase in lift in the week following the first ad exposure and a 46-percent increase over the four weeks following the first exposure, underscoring the latent branding effect."

Couple this new research with Josh Chasin's article on Depression Era-Digital and some interesting facts come to light on what click-through limits ROI when compared to view-through....

"As belts tighten to the point of asphyxiation, I expect to see ad dollars migrating online. One agency media researcher recently told me he thought the economy would force consumers to make hard choices about what paid media they needed, truly needed. He speculated that newspapers would lose subscribers ("Why take the paper? I read it online!") and that Internet technology would soon make pay cable channels and satellite radio dispensable ("I can stream Netflix right to my plasma.") "But nobody," he said, "will cancel their Internet access." And I think he's right."

"As advertisers migrate dollars online, the temptation to pay for performance (of the immediate, trackable-by-click variety) will be great. I hope they can avoid that temptation. In a study with comScore and Tacoda, Starcom found that 6% of the online population accounts for over half of all clickthroughs. This would not be a good time for advertisers to be targeting, effectively, 6% of the online universe. To make matters worse, the clickers' demos are not what most marketers would find attractive. Online branding advertising, on the other hand, can have a profound and far-reaching impact.  I've written in this space before that among consumers exposed to an ad, clickthrough drives only 10% of subsequent site visits and only 14% of incremental sales. In other words, 90% of the traffic and 86% of the sales attributable to advertising exposure accrue through viewthroughs."

Read the last 2 lines again, then take this information to your clients.  If they were happy with click-through response before, just think what results they were truly getting but were not tracking.

Related Categories