“comScore and Starcom USA Release Updated “Natural Born Clickers” Study Showing 50 Percent Drop in Number of U.S. Internet Users Who Click on Display Ads.” This is always one of those topics that the layperson will respond to with a flippant, “I’d love to have a job where I can state the obvious.” However if this study holds water, it’s another sign pointing to a need of revisiting how we measure advertising online.
A friend of mine at a major media company said, “Less than 10% of the internet population clicks on ads and that tends to skew to a younger, rural, low-income demographic. The click is an antiquated way to judge performance of a campaign. That’s the number one thing that keeps Ad Network executives up at night. They don’t have affective means to demonstrate whether a campaign is successful or not to one of their advertisers.”
Television advertising isn’t measured in the same way as internet advertising for the most part (an obvious inability to click hinders that particular metric among others). However, just as we remember commercials on television, we remember ad campaigns on websites. Impressions are valuable from the internet marketing perspective, and will become more important than the click. With the increasing availability of broadband (even my sister in WV manages with her satellite) we’re going to see more television measurement capabilities being applied to web content and campaigns.