No subject is more controversial to a group of web professionals than Web Statistics. The advertising industry is still a little sore with us after we promised early on that Web Stats would give them all that invaluable information they could never get from TV, Radio or Print. This was not a lie, per se, as some sectors are able to mine tremendous amounts of quality information from their web traffic, session login, and cookie data. For most of us, however, the reality has fallen far short of the promise. [Read more…] about Web Stats – Who do you trust?
Archives for May 2008
Tech Crunch Live Blogging at Google IO
Google IO is two-days of in-depth tech sessions on how to build the next generation of web applications. To get updates of what is going on: Tech Crunch is live blogging, there is a twitter feed (googleio) and a back channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/googleio).
Measuring the Effectiveness of Rich Media Ads
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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