Clients of Cream will be familiar with MediaMind  and their digital advertising solutions. MediaMind also publishes regular studies into the effectiveness of online advertising and their latest research, entitled ‘7 best practices for building a smart ad’, is one of their most comprehensive to date.  It’s the result of the analysis of over 300,000 ad creatives and over 1 billion ad impressions with the aim of discovering which environments and which creative treatments work best.

But before we discuss their recommendations, it’s worth introducing you to 2 specific measurement concepts which MediaMind has pioneeered. 

The first is dwell rate, which describes the proportion of impressions that have engaged with a rich media ad – be that by touch, interaction or click.  The second is dwell time, that being defined as the duration of the dwell, in seconds, for users who engaged.

MediaMind has found dwell rate and dwell time to be more indicative of the impact of an ad than the traditional metric of CTR as much of the user activity in reaction to an online ad occurs ‘post impression’.  MediaMind’s own studies have found that users who were exposed to campaigns with high dwell were 3 times more likely to search for a brand related keyword as compared to those who were exposed to campaigns with low dwell.

In addition, campaigns with high dwells boosted advertisers’ site traffic by 69% on average and improved page views and time spent on the site.

So armed with dwell rate and dwell time as our primary measures of ad impact, let’s look at MediaMind’s 7 recommendations:

1. Use Video

Using video ad formats increases dwell rate by 22% because the movement of the video attracts the user’s eye away from the largely ’static’ content of the publisher’s page.  And because video allows the user to stay with the ad for longer, video ads also enjoy an 11% higher dwell time.

2. Initiate Your Video Automatically

If the movement of a video ad draws the eye, then it makes sense for this movement to begin automatically when the user hits the page rather than being user-initiated.  Auto initiated ads enjoy higher dwell rates and CTRs than their user-initiated counterparts.

3. Match the Ad with Site Creative

Contextual relevance is key – MediaMind’s study found that ads surrounded by relevant content saw sharp increases in performance. Not only is content a powerful indicator of intent, people are more likely to spend more time consuming specialist content, and are therefore more likely to notice and engage with ads.

4. Use Richer, More Visible Ad Formats

As a rule of thumb,MediaMind found that the richer the format, the higher the level of engagement (although this isn’t always the case – at Cream we’ve sometimes found that static campaigns can outperform flash campaigns).

Homepage takeovers, expandable banners, peelback banners and video extensions were found to increase the average dwell duration. Commercial breaks, floating ads and overlays commanded high attention from users and therefore resulted in higher dwell rates (albeit combined with lower dwell durations).

5. Use Synched Ads

Synching ads involves taking 2 different placements and creating one unified experience, and it’s an experience which creates impact without being too intrusive like some other rich media formats.  Both dwell rate and CTR were observed to increase, even when compared to running 2 different regular ads on the same page.

6. Take Advantage of Dynamic Creative Optimisation

This process involves the ad server combining different creative concepts with different copy treatments and serving the ad that delivers the greatest level of interaction from users – be that clicks, conversions, dwells or a combination of those actions.

Effectively, clients don’t have to make a call on which creative they believe will be the most effective as the ad server discovers that via trial and error and then focuses on the most effective execution.

Unsurprisingly, dyamically created campaigns saw a 6% increase in dwell rate and a 10% increase in dwell time.

7. Integrate Exchanges into your Media Buy

Incorporating ad exchanges into campaigns was found to boost return on investment and lower cost per conversion.

To help marketers digest these 7 practices, MediaMind have produced an infographic which we’ve included below.

The full report, which includes benchmarks for ad performance by region and country, can be downloaded here.

 

 

By: Carla Burgess

Posted in Advertising, Online | No Comments »

It’s the perennial online advertising conundrum for premium and luxury marketers – hand-pick the environment for your brand’s advertising or opt for an RoI driven, but blind, approach. 

Both arguments have their merits but as demands on marketers grow to deliver demonstrable results, the lure of performance-driven advertising becomes ever more irrisistable. 

So 2 pieces of research from AOL and the AOP released last week make for interesting reading. 

AOL’s study, which quizzed 1,200 consumers and was conducted in association with GfK NOP Media, found that environment was key in delivering the best engagement levels. Almost 1/3 (29%) of their respondents  said they would feel more positive about a brand if it was advertised on a site they trusted.  And once users felt they could trust a site, they were more likely to respond to advertising and buy the products advertised. 

AOL’s research found 4 factors crucial in building trust amongst users – good quality information, emotional attachment, prominent user involvement and modernity. Websites that ticked these 4 boxes were more likely to be visited regularly, to enjoy higher levels of participation and sharing and to be more fertile environments for advertisers.

The study by the AOP,  with a sample of 2,000 users and conducted in association with ComScore, shed greater light on which sites were more likely to be trusted and which weren’t. 

Their research found that 62% of users were more likely to trust advertising on original content sites – classified by them as the sites of UK newspapers, UK commercial TV and radio, UK magazines and trade or business publications. 52% were found to ‘trust’ advertising on portals (e.g. MSN, Yahoo) and just 32% trusted advertising on social networks. 

In addition, 41% of the respondents said advertising on original content sites was more relevant to them and of high quality, compared with just 19% on portals and 18% on social networks. Where trust in an online environment could be demonstrated, site visits to the advertiser’s brand site was increased by 37% on original content sites. 

Of course, advertising performance is not just based on trust in the environment – AOL’s study also underlined the importance of relevancy to site content and quality of the advertising itself – but trust clearly plays a key part, and probably more so for premium-priced products. 

The problem with taking a purely RoI based approach to online advertising is that decisions can be taken based on only part of the picture.  As we’ve discussed before, a great part of the relevance of online ads is the impact they have post impression on brand preference and favourability – factors which can result in ‘post impression’ visits to the advertiser’s website and factors which will be overlooked by taking a pure CTR or CPC based approach.

Of course, part of the RoI calculation is based on investment, and costs are higher in known online environments then when bought blind, but these 2 studies would suggest that brands should be hand-picking their online environments based on their authority and relevance, just as they do in the offline world.

By: Carla Burgess

Posted in Advertising, Online | No Comments »