What's the Value of a "Click"?

The number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32 percent of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16 percent in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8 percent of the Internet user base) accounting for the vast majority (85 percent) of all clicks, say comScore.

You can draw your own conclusions about what that means. Some might argue that display advertising "doesn't work." Others would argue simply that clicks are not the right way to measure impact.

“The act of clicking on a display ad is experiencing rapid attrition in the current digital marketplace,” says Linda Anderson, comScore VP. “Today, marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent 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 significant impact," says Anderson. "As a result, savvy marketers are moving to an evaluation of the impact that all ad impressions – whether clicked or not – have on consumer behavior, mirroring the manner in which traditional advertising has been measured for decades using reach and frequency metrics.”

The results underscore the notion that, for most display ad campaigns, the click-through is not the most appropriate metric for evaluating campaign performance, comScore says.

Rather, advertisers should consider evaluating campaigns based on their view-through impact. The company has conducted more than 200 client studies demonstrating that online display ads generate significant lift in brand site visitation, trademark search, and both online and offline sales among those Internet users who were exposed to the online ad campaigns – whether they clicked on the ad or not, says comScore.

“A click means nothing, earns no revenue and creates no brand equity," says Anderson.

“You want people to visit your website, seek more information, purchase a product, become a lead, keep your brand top of mind, learn something new, feel differently – the list goes on. Regardless of whether the consumer clicked on an ad or not, the key is to determine how that ad unit influenced them to think, feel or do something they wouldn’t have done otherwise,” says Starcom USA SVP/Director, Research & Analytics John Lowell.