Moving Beyond Clicks in Display Advertising Depends on Creative

A couple posts back (Two Metrics for Capturing More Value From Display Advertising) I talked about a couple of other metrics that can be used to measure performance besides clicks, View Through Rate and Engagement Time. There is a little piece in eMarketer about engagement time, which they call dwell time, in the entertainment industry and how it has performed. The chart is below and the numbers look really good.

With average click rates of less than 0.4%, entertainment industry ads perform somewhat worse than average. But their dwell rate of 8.7% compares with a rate of 7.1% across all industries, and average dwell time is 35% longer for the entertainment industry. This means entertainment industry ads are more likely to be interacted with—gaining branding value—but less apt to have that value measured if marketers look only to clicks.

Dwell Rates for Rich Media Display Ads

The first thing that pops up here though is you need creative that that can be “dwelled” on and interacted with. I have linked back to our post on Creative Models, (Four Creative Models For Effective Banner Advertising), but this is the category we call Wow Factor. It is using strong creative as eye candy to capture your interest and then giving you a reason to engage. It is a great strategy, but it has very high ad production costs when compared to other creative model types.

One of the great things that AdBean does is give advertisers a way to produce ads that can be interacted with and measure dwell rate themselves. If you are not launching a blockbuster movie this summer, you might not get a 53 second engagement time, but the 38 seconds for the rest of us is better feedback is still more time than the standard TV spot - which you just fast forward through anyways.