Defying the 80-20 principle, 8% of Internet users account for 85% of clicks (for display ads).
- The number of people who click on display ads has dropped from 32% to 16% in the last 2 years.
- 8% of all Internet users account for 85% of all clicks
- 4% of all Internet users are considered "Heavy Clickers" – they make up 50% of all clicks.
[Via a study conducted by Comscore/Starcom USA and Tacoda for US population]
This is an important finding for the simple reason that the notion of ‘clickthrough’ should be revisited and I couldn’t agree more with Comscore’s VP (Marketing) statement:
“marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84% of Internet users who don’t click on an ad” – source
Bang on!
Time to go beyond the click? Well, yes! As web expands beyond the current form (for instance, International domain names), niche sites will emerge and measuring the audience (and content) based on clicks does not justifies the quality of the content (and that’s why we stopped accepting CPC ads).
Reminds me of a sign hanging at Einstein’s office that read:
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
What’s your take on the current state of online advertising industry?
Which research findings are these?
I’m of the opinion, not only clicks, but also page visits matter little. Quality of the traffic, number of potential customers actually visiting the page, number of potential customers visiting a page getting converted to actual sales enquiries matter.
Hoping more companies realize this.
Wow, that’s a staggering number! And the most surprising result of the survey was “The number of people who click on display ads has dropped from 32% to 16% in the last 2 years. ”
I agree that niche sites will emerge and it’s not justified to use number of clicks as the only measure for audience and quality of content. But CPM has its shortfalls as well and fails miserably with a lot of scam ad campaigns around “Visit 100 pages per day we sent you via email, and we give you 500 bucks”.
This is surely going to be a problem.. PPC gonna get affected majorly..
PPC companies has to think over their ideas..
well it won’t change overnight
I get 2 thoughts on the first read.
First is that PPC will definitely take a bow and as a matter of fact it should! TV like advertising will again grow and this time grow on the internet.
The second thought is that, products/brands which are primarily looking for visibility / buzz / recognition will advertise. Advertising with the motive of Sales will drop as they will soon find out that they would be coughing up more money than that generated from sales from those ads.