Are your campaigns running long enough?
Understandably, wearout is a legitimate concern for online advertisers. The long-held belief is that online ads lose their effectiveness in a shorter period of time than ads on television. However, is it possible that some advertisers may overcompensate by pulling high performing ads too quickly?
Are online visitors seeing and being engaged by online display ads longer than most would think? Are advertisers maximizing the value they are getting from each campaign and each piece of creative?
This analysis of engagement data from several thousand campaigns run on the Collective Network® shows that engagement continues to increase for up to fifteen weeks after a campaign launches, regardless of the impression levels.
What we found
1. People engage with online ads longer than expected.
Though conventional wisdom is that online ads wear out quickly, our analysis shows that Interaction Rates peak at a campaign length of 13 weeks and then fall off gradually. This is a critical finding as the average campaign length is only 7 weeks. So it would appear that in most cases advertisers are not running online campaigns long enough to garner their full value. Click Through Rates (CTRs) also peak at a campaign length of 13 weeks, but fall off more quickly.
It’s worth noting that our analysis shows that even in high-volume campaigns engagement remains persistent, even as CTRs drop dramatically (around the 8th week of the campaign). Here again, we are seeing Web users interacting with ads long after any click activity has ceased.
As comScore’s® study on “Natural Born Clickers” revealed, a very small portion of the Internet population actually clicks on ads, and they are generally not an advertiser’s audience. We are, for the first time, observing a much larger online audience; the Engagers. The next phase of our research is to measure how Engagers’ online activity translates to purchase behavior.
2. Engagement sometimes happens where you don’t expect it.
As we reviewed the Interaction Rates by context and advertising category, we found several instances where engagement was highest in non-endemic contexts. For example, auto ads underperform in the auto contexts; yet over perform in fashion contexts. CPG ads over perform on religious contexts.
