Flite Blog

Dwell on Branding Research Report, April 2010 (Microsoft Advertising)

Clickthrough used to be king. Now it's barely a squire.

Display advertising is about delivering value to a brand, whether it means increasing awareness or perception, or nudging consumers further along the purchase funnel. However, the predominant metric in digital advertising continues to be clickthrough rate (CTR), even though it's an unimportant measure of a display ad's effectiveness.

Come again?

I'll repeat: CTR is an unimportant measure of a display ad's effectiveness.

This isn't a matter of opinion.

1. Only a small segment of the overall online audience actually clicks on display ads. According to a comScore study, 8% of Internet users account for 85% of all display ad clicks, and 72% are uncomfortable clicking on ads altogether. By measuring clicks, you ignore the impact an ad has on almost three-quarters of your audience.

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Wikia, the leading network of collaboratively-published video game, entertainment, and lifestyle content on the web, recently sought to promote Qwizards, a video quiz series out of its Video Game channel in which gaming enthusiasts compete on trivia.  

Wikia used Flite’s Ad Studio to create half-page ad units with 10 different “webisodes” whereby users could view and learn more about the quiz show.

The first ad variant, using the Flite Carousel component to display the available webisodes, didn’t perform. Interaction and engagement metrics made it fairly clear that users weren’t grasping that they could watch videos within the ad itself. Using Flite’s real-time performance metrics Wikia was able to optimize across the test variants within hours.

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There's a reason display ads that incorporate photo galleries have become increasingly popular. People like to interact visually with Web content, and they'd like to do so without having to leave the page they had deliberately chosen to visit. A properly-designed ad with embedded photos and an intuitive way to interact with them can be an inviting, safe attraction for viewers, and given the value of ad engagement to a brand, a considerably compelling format for advertisers.

Let's look at a few examples that surface photos and allow interaction and additional functionality in different ways. The ads below are mocks and are displayed here only for demonstration purposes. All mocks created using Flite Ad Studio 3.

Ads with Photo Slideshows

These ads incorporate image rotators, typically with previous/next arrows or radio buttons to give the viewer control over the process of reviewing the images.

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