Collective Thinking

 July 15, 2011

In the latest episode of DigidayTV, Digiday editor in chief Brian Morrissey and director of content Corey Kronengold are joined by Collective SVP of Audience Insights Justin Evans and C3 cofounder and COO Jeff Greenfield. The discussion addresses how ad networks are morphing into "technology-enabled marketing services companies" and the challenge of measuring brand advertising online. 

JEREMY STANLEY, VP Analytics, Collective
JUSTIN EVANS, SVP Audience Development, Collective

Over the years there have been a number of studies that have examined the fallacy of using CTR as a measure of campaign success, and the nature of the clicker’s themselves. One of the best known, comScore’s Natural Born Clicker’s study, revealed that a small minority of web users make up the majority of click activity online.

Yet, many marketers continue to rely on the click as their primary measure of campaign effectiveness, including campaigns with branding objectives.

In new analysis by Collective’s insights team, we examined the advertising interactions of over 100 million anonymous user profiles and over one billion advertising impressions served in the first months of 2011. In addition, we reviewed the action lift of 100 campaigns, and brand lift reported in 400 campaigns.

Key findings:

99% of cookies examined never click.

More than expected, a tiny fraction of people ever click on an ad. In fact, 99% of stable cookies examined never click on an ad. This is a more pronounced disparity than was reported in comScore’s study. Further, users who have clicked in the past are twice as likely to click again in the future.

Many clicks are accidental.

Nearly 20% of ads that received any click activity received multiple clicks within the same impression, suggesting that these clicks were unintentional. This effect is especially seen among online gamers, who clicked 43% more often than non-gamers, and on mobile devices where users clicked 123% more often.

Intentional clickers are lower income.