Online display ad clicks drop by 50 per cent

The web may be picking up advertising from other mediums but net users seem to be getting lazier. The number of people online who click on display ads has dropped by 50 per cent in less than two years, according to a, "Natural Born Clickers", from comScore and media agency StarCom.

The findings also highlighted that only eight per cent of internet users account for 85 per cent of all clicks. The collaborative studies focus on an understanding of how internet users click on display ads.

This year's updated results presented by comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni and Kim McCarthy, Manager, Research and Analytics, at Starcom, indicated that the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32 per cent of internet users in July 2007 to only 16 per cent in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing eight per cent of the internet user base) accounting for the vast majority (85 per cent) of all clicks.

"The act of clicking on a display ad is experiencing rapid attrition in the current digital marketplace," said Linda Anderson, comScore Vice-President of Marketing Solutions and author of the study. Elaborating on the study, she said: "Today, marketers who attempt to optimise their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 per cent of internet users who don't click on an ad. That's precisely the wrong thing to do, because other comScore research has shown that non-clicked ads can also have a big impact.

"As a result, savvy marketers are moving to an evaluation of the impact that all ad impressions – whether clicked or not – have on consumer behaviour, mirroring the manner in which traditional advertising has been measured using reach and frequency metrics."

From the client perspective, comScore found that display ads, regardless of clicks, generate significant lift in brand-site visitation, trademark search and both online and offline sales among those exposed to the ads. The figures, when combined with ground realities indicated that within one week, consumers exposed to a display ad were 65 per cent more likely to visit the advertiser's site than users who never saw the ad. Even at four weeks, people exposed to displays ads are 45 per cent more likely to visit the brand's site.

ComScore also found that online users exposed to a particular brand's display ads conduct more searches on that brand's name than those in the control group. Still, the percentage who search is relatively small. When exposed to both paid search and display ads, consumers were found to be nearly twice as likely to make an online purchase on a retailer's site, which is greater than the sum of each ad tactic's individual effects.

For research purposes, the clickers were segmented into heavy, moderate and light clicking segments based on the group of users accounting for the top 50 per cent of clicks (heavy), middle 30 per cent (moderate), and bottom 20 per cent (light).

In 2007 report, heavy clickers represented six per cent of internet users, moderate clickers accounted for 10 per cent and light clickers accounted for 16 per cent.

By March 2009, those numbers had dropped substantially in each case, to four per cent of internet users for heavy clickers, four per cent for moderate ones.

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