Click Rates Stabilitze

Online advertising "click-through rates" have been falling for a few years. But MediaMind Technologies says the declines have abated. The company’s analysis of data from July 2006 through July 2010 shows that annual average click rates have plateaued, at 0.9 percent.

MediaMind Technologies, the leading independent provider of integrated digital advertising solutions, released today a new Global Benchmark Report, titled “Standard Banners –Non-Standard Results.” The research shows that global Clickthrough Rate (CTR) stopped declining in 2009 and 2010 and remained fixed at around 0.09%. The full study is available here.

An increased volume of display advertising likely is the reason for the decline in click-through behavior.

As more budgets were poured into display, users were exposed to more and more ads. However, the number of ads that a user clicked on did not catch up with the number of ads that a user was exposed to, thus reducing the overall CTR.

Imagine that you are exposed to one thousand ads each year, and that you click on five of them. Your CTR is 0.5%. Imagine now that you are exposed to five thousand ads; you are probably not going to keep clicking at the same vigor, so instead of 25 clicks, you only click on 20 ads.

Therefore your CTR is now only 0.4%. Thus, as users are exposed to more ads, their CTR drops.

Have Click Rates Finally Stopped Declining? - eMarketer