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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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Adobe Flex – sitting with the cool kids

In the web’s earlier days the cool kids were the Macromedia Flash Developers. They had that mystical quality to them; a special blend of tech voodoo and creative style. A great Flash artists could bring any early browser screaming to its knees, but inbetween dropped frames and hung processors you swore you were looking at the future of the web. Flash Developers were the Rock Star developers of the web a decade back.

Now we try to use Flash in moderation as if it were a controlled substance. Most business websites have a pinch of flash to spice up the bullet points and mission statements, but it all seems perfunctory and subdued. In the business world, Flash has been relegated to bit parts like tie-ins or transitions, back seat functions to the AJAX revolution. Sure, the media industry is still addicted to their Flash applications as is the online gaming and advertising sectors. For most development houses, however, Flash became an unfamiliar tool used sparingly.

Adobe buying Macromedia has successfully righted that ship, in my opinion. They’re first all Adobe take on the Flash franchise was to relicense a little thing called Flex. Flex was originally a Macromedia product targeted for upper echelon corporations. Flex was and is Flash for programmers. Plain and simple, Flex lets your code slingers write decent Flash applications using tools they understand, namely programing languages. When Adobe got ahold of the property, they wisely saw the potential for curious geeks to adopt this new shiny thing, promote it within their communities, and build it up to a viable web solution. Flex 3 SDK (Software Development Kit) is free to to download and licensed under a open-source friendly Mozilla Public License. Adoption of the Flex 3 platform has been impressive, thanks in no small part to adobe’s marketing of the tools as they have.

N ow the geeks are sitting side by side with the cool kids at the web table. I would say we now have to work on the Jocks (DBAs), but that just might be a bridge too far.

In upcoming posts I will review Adobe Flex and Adobe Air.

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CrunchBase Information
Adobe Systems
Information provided by CrunchBase

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Consumers using blogs and user-generated content

Interesting information regarding online consumer use of blogs, video and podcasts:

Groundswell: From the chart: In the US, of online consumers, 25% read blogs, 14% comment on blogs, 29% watch user generated video, and 11% listen to podcasts. The US is the clear leader in both creation and viewing of user-generated video, which is at least partly due to the fact that YouTube is mostly in English….Podcasts still haven’t caught on the US after years of availability.”

These numbers will be different for the B2B audience, but are very important for the B2C audience.  B2B often follows directly in the footsteps of the consumer market, so they’re interesting from a trend point-of-view. Looks like video is still pretty important.