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March 20, 2007

According to new numbers published by DoubleClick, overall CTR (click-through rates) for online video ads range from 0.4 percent to 0.74 percent depending on the format used.

On average, less than 1 percent may not sound like much, but it's far higher than most display ads. Plain .GIF and .JPG image ads typically get about 0.1 percent CTRs.

Globally, interaction with Internet video ads has been increasing. For example, as the percentage of video ads went up on the EyeBlaster network, the interaction rate has also increased, from 7 percent in 2005's first quarter, to 18 percent in last year's third quarter.

Average click-through rates aren't the only goals of online advertising, although they are still one of the most readily measured site analytics. It took years for online ad marketers to establish that branding is important as well.

Research published in June of last year by aQuantive's Atlas unit looked to tie a video ad's potential effectiveness to how much of a commercial was watched, resulting in a proprietary metric called "Brand Exposure Duration or BED for short."

aQuantive's survey produced interesting results for brand marketers.

The counterintuitive bottom line was that "many viewers watched longer videos in their entirety.

They also found that the longest video advertising actually showed the greatest viewing duration, indicating that many viewers watched this video multiple times through rewinding."

Independently of an ad's length, its appeal and therefore its effectiveness lies in the ad's topic or specific industry, the context in which it is shown and, most of all, the quality of the creative itself.

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Source: eMarketer