A new study released by iPerceptions shows that text ads are still king in terms of the types of ads a user is most likely to click on while video ads are pretty unpopular with people. Below is how the numbers break down.
- 25% are likely to click on simple text ads
- 20% are likely to click on display ads follow
- 20% are likely to click on right banners
- 12% are likely to click on top banners
- 11% are likely to click on video ads
I’ve read through their press release and tried browsing the iPerceptions site, but wasn’t able to find the methodology they used for the study. Looking at what the company does, it’s most likely that this mainly pertains to regular websites (and not search engines), but I don’t know for sure However, there are still a few important pieces of info that are present along with some important questions that are left unanswered.
First, this study shows that if you want traffic to your site (or if you’re trying to create a revenue model for you own website), then you should take into account the various results from the study. Users are more likely to click on your text ads rather than if you spend a lot of money on some fancy video ads. One surprising result, at least to me, is that side banners are more likely to get a click than top banners. Maybe it has something to do with how the information is displayed or that users see the ad for a longer period of time (as they scroll). Either way, it’s an interesting result.
A question that I’m left with from this study is… a user is “more likely” to click on a text ad, but what do they actually click on? The company states that they “collected user-generated feedback.” Many times, people say one thing and do another. Overall though, it at least shows that people are more content seeing text advertisements than banners.
A bigger question I have is, what about the actual conversion? Again, it’s great to hear that text ads are the ones that are most likely to get clicked on, but I’d want to know if display advertisements (being prettier, and also usually able to provide more information to and interactivity with the user), are able to also prequalify the user more.
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Hi Andrey,
Thanks so much for the write-up. With respect to the methodology, I can outline how we approached it. We surveyed 14,000 real website visitors across a broad portfolio of media sites. In essence, we wanted to look at content-based publishers who ran multiple types of ad units on their sites. We used out standard, two-stage survey methodology, and tracked self-reported likelihood to click on a variety of ad units. We employed a multiple-select type question, so that we could identify collinearity between ad units. Behavioral tracking on those sites would certainly have furnished some interesting results, but it would not have yielded visibility into visitors’ web-wide ad engagement patterns.
Thanks!
Michael Whitehouse
Senior Marketing Analyst
iPerceptions