AdWords introduces View-Through Conversion Tracking
Google AdWords announced View-through conversion reporting, a new tracking feature that measures not clicked on conversions for display advertising campaigns on the Google Content Network.
AdWords Conversion Tracking lets you activate the optional View-through conversion reporting column on the Campaigns tab, showing the number of conversions that occurred within 30 days of your display ad appearing on the Google Content Network for which there was no ad click generated.
It’s important to note that only image ads count: search campaigns or text creatives in content campaigns will not be tracked.
View-through reporting data could be very useful in optimizing campaigns and choosing the best suited sites for the ads, but strong criticism has already arisen, pointing out that this new feature could be nothing but a way to cover banner ads’ decreasing effectiveness year after year.
Natural Born Clickers are an endangered species
An interesting study by comScore and Starcom USA shows that in the last two years, the number of internet users who click on display ads halved: from 32% of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009.
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Heavy, Moderate, Light Display Ad Clicker Analysis March 2009 vs. July 2007 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore |
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| Share of All Internet Users |
Share of Click-Throughs | |||
| Jul-07 | Mar-09 | Jul-07 | Mar-09 | |
| Total Clickers | 32% | 16% | 100% | 100% |
| Heavy Clickers | 6% | 4% | 50% | 67% |
| Moderate Clickers | 10% | 4% | 30% | 18% |
| Light Clickers | 16% | 8% | 20% | 15% |
| Non-Clickers | 68% | 84% | 0% | 0% |
What could be easily labeled as banner blindness, is actually, from the glass half full perspective, evidence of the strong interaction between online display advertising and consumers’ search behavior: not only new metrics like the Dwell Time are being introduced to measure the effectiveness of rich media ads, but a study from iProspect shows how internet users perform searches related to ads after being exposed to online display advertising
Search and Online Display Advertising
According to iProspect’s Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Advertising Integration Study, 52 percent of internet users actively respond to online display advertising by clicking on the ad (31%) or performing a search on the search engine (27%).
Wow, impressive numbers. Probably because the numbers themselves don’t add up and need to be taken with a grain of salt, because of the misleading methodology used in the study. Let’s look at the question internet users were asked to answer:
What the results actually show, is that in a 6 month time frame, 31% of the respondents include clicking on ads as one of the possible responses to display advertising (because of the “select all that apply option”).
The study is not actually revealing that “31% of Internet users INITIALLY respond to online display advertising”, because there is no way to measure the times that this particular response occurred compared to the total number of ad impressions in 6 months, therefore it’s impossible to compare the frequency of this particular kind of response against the other options shown in the image below:
Measuring Online Display Advertisement’s power to drive search behavior is an impossible task, let’s be honest about it. IProspect warns marketers that ads on offline channels, as radio and TV, convert online too.
What emerges from all these studies and AdWords View-through conversion tracking, is that SEO, SEM and offline marketing efforts need to be coordinated and harmonic. Not only domain names in display ads need to be intuitive and easily remembered, but offline slogans and online display creatives should be reflected in landing pages’ keywords.
The final lesson in creating Brand awareness through Online Display Advertisement comes from Gene Hackman himself: View-through conversions may not be immediate…
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