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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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Rich Media Ads – Advantages & Disadvantages

As discussed in Types of Online Advertising, rich media ads with which viewers can interact and may contain animation, audio and video. Rich media ads can be powerful way to convey your message, but these types of ads have some advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

  • Communicate more information – through different types of media (audio, video, interaction). Rich media ads can have video, audio, animation and even small applications or games.
  • Collect more information – either by programming in more sophisticated analytics or simply by asking for information.
  • More clicks – As annoying as these ads are, they are more likely to be clicked on because they catch people’s attention (please follow IAB guidelines), at least during the first week or so.
  • Powerful branding – Even if the ad isn’t clicked on, viewers are still more likely to see and remember the ad than traditional display advertising.

Disadvantages

  • May slow down a website – These ads tend to be larger in file size, which takes longer to download. Even with faster Internet connections being more prevalent, you should be aware of your audience and how many are on slower connections. Even with faster Internet connections, an overly large file or many rich media ads can still slow down a website. If your website is too slow, people will just go elsewhere.
  • May annoy – Since these ads tend to be more visible to viewers, they also can quickly become more annoying. So stick with the IAB guidelines and place ads for short time periods (no longer than a month) to maximize the effectiveness of the ad.
  • More expensive – They are more difficult to create and require a higher skillset. These types of ads are usually more expensive to place on a website as well (because of the larger file size and annoyance factor).
  • May be blocked – Although most people have the software installed necessary to view these ads, it is fairly easy to turn off this option in most browsers and in some ad blocking software. However, as more websites use the same technology to increase their interaction and functionality, viewers are less likely to block the ads.

If you are aware of these advantages and disadvantages, you can make an informed decision about purchasing these types of ads (or allowing them to be displayed on your website or blog).

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Types of Online Advertising

Advertising online can increase your brand awareness and promote a product/service. Online advertising has a major advantage over other types of advertising (tv, radio, print) because it is very easy to measure the effectiveness of online campaigns. In a series of posts, I’ll discuss the different types of advertising, their advantages and disadvantages, and how to measure their effectiveness.

There are 3 Main Types of Ads:

  • Rich Media: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has defined these as “advertisements with which users can interact” and can include video, sound, animation. Ads which just animate but don’t have any interaction are just display ads (see below). Ads should follow IAB guidelines to maximize impact without being overly annoying (which has the opposite effect from what you want). There are many types of rich media ads, including:
    • peel-back
    • floating
    • expanding
    • transitional (interstitial, introstitial, exterstitial)
    • video
    • popup/popunder
  • Display Ads: These ads combine text, images, and animation (but are not interactive – those are rich media – see above) to convey a message. Display ads mostly differ in sizes (see IAB for Ad Size Guidelines). Here are some of the most popular sizes:
    • leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels)
    • skyscraper (120 x 600 pixels or 160 x 600 pixels for wide skyscraper)
    • banner (468 x 60 pixels)
    • half-page (300 x 600 pixels)
    • square button (or tile) (125 x 125 pixels)
    • medium rectangle (300 x 250 pixels)
  • Text Ads: Text ads are typically just that, text. These ads typically are cheaper, but have the added bonus of usually being searchable by search engines and are less-ignored by readers than some other types of ads. Some of the more common types of text ads:
    • link ads
    • contextual ads
    • search engine marketing ads (pay per click – ex. Google Adwords)
    • online directories

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