Once you understand the different types of online ads and the advantages and disadvantages of rich media ads, it is important to know how to measure the effectiveness of these ads (especially since you’re probably paying a premium for their creation).
Just like display ads, these metrics are important:
- Impressions: How many times is the ad served to a person (or as near as can be estimated). Impressions to search engine crawlers and bots should be filtered out (most ad servers do this automatically).
- Clicks: How many times someone clicked on the ad (and was taken to your website – remember to target the landing page). This should also filter out search engine crawlers and bots.
- Click-through rate (CTR): The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions multiplied by 100 for a percentage. This number will typically be pretty small. CTR of 3% is very good for rich media ads, but will quickly decrease the longer the ad is left on a website. Many CTR will be under 1%. This is an indicator of how effective the ads is or how many times the ad was seen each time before it was clicked on.
Unique to rich media ads, this metric is also important:
- Interaction time: Or an average of how long people interacted with the ad (clicked on it, moused over the ad, played the video, etc.). How long this time is will depend on what interaction the ad has in it. If it is just a mouse-over that displays more text the interaction time will be much less than an ad which contains a game (usually).
Since rich media ads are usually more expensive to produce and place on a website, measuring their effectiveness is extremely important to reaching the goals and return on investment (ROI) you have for the ad. Most ad servers will have the first three metrics. The third is becoming more available, but usually requires additional programming into the ad for proper tracking.
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