Traditional audience measurement metrics that do not adjust for cookie deletion overestimate the number of unique users by two to threefold, according to a new report.
The MediaMind semiannual Benchmark research was based on 26 billion impressions served from Jan to Dec 2010.
It found metrics that don’t adjust for cookie deletion, limits advertisers’ ability to assess the effectiveness of their campaign in reaching their target audience.
The study also analyzed benchmarks for the ratio between impression volume and audience reach in different markets.
According to the analysis, US advertisers need 50 million impressions to reach five million users, and 200 million impressions to reach 18 million users.
Other key findings from the report include:
• Britons delete cookies more often than Germans, but not as often as Americans or Canadians.
• Only a small fraction of online users click on ads and browse to the advertiser’s site. However, for every user that clicks, more than 10 others actively engage with banners even without clicking.
• MediaMind’s benchmarks show that while being relatively reserved clickers, Britons are some of the world’s most enthusiastic engagers with online Rich Media ads.
• On average, Britons engage with more than five ads for every 100 that they are exposed to, as measured by Dwell Rate, the proportion of Rich Media impressions that were intentionally engaged with by touch, interaction or click. This is more than our European neighbours but not quite as high than the US and Canada.
• However, Brits engage longest with rich media – their average engagement lasts almost 60 seconds—the highest Dwell Time in the world
UK is the global leader in time spent with Rich Media banners
Only a small fraction of online users click on ads and browse to the advertiser’s site. However, for every user that clicks, more than 10 others actively engage with banners even without clicking.
MediaMind’s newly released benchmarks show that while being relatively reserved clickers, Britons are some of the world’s most enthusiastic engagers with online Rich Media ads.
On average, Britons engage with more than five ads for every 100 that they are exposed to, as measured by Dwell Rate. The average engagement lasts almost 60 seconds—the highest Dwell Time in the world!
Measuring the proportion of impressions that were engaged with, serves as a proxy for thebranding effect of ads. To measure the effectiveness of branding, MediaMinduses two metrics: Dwell Rate and Average Dwell Time.
Dwell Rate measures the proportion of Rich Media impressions that were intentionally engaged with by touch, interaction or click. Average Dwell Time measures the duration of a Dwell in seconds for users who engaged. In both cases, unintentional Dwell lasting less than one second is excluded.
Dwell provides an estimate of the share of impressions that were seen by users with high likelihood. Users’ natural tendency is to follow the mouse cursor movement with their eyes. Dwell measures the proportion of impressions that had a meaningful mouse-touch, lasting more than one second. While there have been users who have seen the ads and have not touched them with their mouse, Dwell allows us togauge the number of users that are very likely to see the ad.
Furthermore, a research by MediaMind, Microsoft Advertising and comScore shows that Dwell does have an actual effect on brand metrics. The results of the joint study indicate that users who were exposed to campaigns with high Dwell are three times more likely to search for brand related keywords as compared to users who were exposed to campaigns with low Dwell.
Moreover, campaigns with high Dwell boosted advertisers’ site traffic by 69% and improved brand engagement—increasing page views and time spent on the brand’s site.
While being some of the world’s most enthusiastic engagers, Britons tend to click on ads less than users in other countries. Click Through Rate (CTR) for Standard Banners is 0.09%, similar to the global average; however, Rich Media banners are twice as likely to receive a click from UK users with CTR of 0.20%.
As far as regional differences are concerned, there is a clear rule of thumb. If you are an English speaking country, your CTR and Dwell are likely to be lower. Thus, the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have lower CTR performance ascompared to other countries. This is mainly due to differences in user behavior and market maturity.
Worldwide, Rich Media encourages clicks. In fact, CTR for Rich Media is more than three times higher than CTR for Standard Banners. Global CTR for Rich Media is 0.30% ascompared to 0.09% for Standard Banners.
Rich Media works better than Standard Banners for several reasons. The dynamic Rich Media stands in contrast to the publisher’s textual content, and therefore attracts users’ attention from the content to the ad. Furthermore, by enabling users to interact with the marketing message, Rich Media increases recall. Rich creatives also have the ability to feed data dynamically and increase relevancy. When all of these effects are combined, the result is an increase in clicks as compared to Standard Banners.
How many users do UK campaigns actually reach?
One of the basic and most important metrics for any campaign, online or offline, is the number of users it reaches and the average frequency. This is quite obvious for branding purposes—the more users you reach, the more users who are exposed to your message and become aware of your products. Even for direct response purposes, the pool of users reached represents the group of users with the potential to convert.
Traditional cookie counting methods simply count all cookies. However, after a user deletes his or her cookie, a new cookie is placed in his browser and therefore he is counted again, incorrectly, as a new user. comScore estimates that 33% of users delete their third party cookies (cookies used by ad servers) during a period of one month.
An analysis of cookie deletion in MediaMind’s Benchmarks shows that traditional measurement of reach over-counts users by 2.6 in the UK. Britons delete cookies more often than Germans, but not as often as Americans or Canadians.
To overcome cookie deletion, MediaMind has developed a new metric called ‘Adjusted Unique’. The methodology behind the metric has been thoroughly tested for accuracy and was certified by the Media Rating Council (MRC) as IAB compliant for measuring reach. ‘Adjusted Unique’ sets a new industry standard for accuracy in measuring reach and enables advertisers a new level of accuracy when analyzing the effectiveness of their campaigns.
“Advertisers who use traditional audience measurement metrics can never be certain of the number of users who were exposed to their marketing message,” said Gal Trifon, President and CEO at MediaMind. “Now, advertisers can use the ‘Adjusted Unique’ metric as a measure of campaign effectiveness alongside other metrics such as clicks, engagements and conversions.”
The full study is available here.
http://www.mediamind.com
