Online display advertising is far more effective than conventional metrics suggest, Gian Fulgoni, executive chairman and co-founder of comScore Inc., told the audience at yesterday’s Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada Mixx Canada Conference Series event in Toronto.
In a keynote presentation entitled “Display Fights Back,” Fulgoni focused specifically on the use of cookies and clicks as tools for measuring the success of online campaigns, pointing out the numerous ways these metrics can be distorted.
For example, users who delete cookies between website visits are counted as a unique visitors when they return. Conversely, Fulgoni said that cookie deletion, which has increased in recent years, means that research often fails to report multiple visits to a website—and by extension, views of an advertisement on that website—by a single user.
“You will, using cookies, grossly overstate the reach of your campaign and understate the interaction and impressions,” said Fulgoni.
According to Fulgoni, clicks also paint an inaccurate picture, especially when comparing the effectiveness of display advertising to that of search advertising. Search comprises the largest component of online ad revenues,, which Fulgoni said was due in part to the continued reliance on clicks as a measurement tool.
“If you use clicks to evaluate display campaigns, you are playing on the home turf of search,” said Fulgoni. “And I think display will lose that battle almost every time.”
Fulgoni said search ads naturally deliver a higher conversion-to-sale rate, as they are served when a consumer indicates an interest in a product by conducting an online query for it. The emphasis on conversion, he said, misses the cumulative effects of display advertising, which can lead to increased visits to an advertiser’s website, more search activity for a product, and a boost in online and offline sales.
It is this “lift,” said Fulgoni, that web publishers should consider when comparing display to search.
Fulgoni reinforced his point with ComScore research that measured site visits, search queries and sales generated by a search campaign, a display campaign and a combination of the two. Display advertising was revealed to provide almost twice the value in terms of total sales lift when its audience reach—compared to the small reach of search—was factored in. The results also suggested that a combination of the two would prove most effective for advertisers.
Fulgoni closed by saying publishers are cheating themselves out of important advertising dollars by relying on click measurement as opposed to his suggested metrics.
“If I was an advertiser, and I knew the true impact of a display campaign, I would go to a publisher and say, ‘I’ll pay you on the basis of clicks,’ ” said Fulgoni. “And I’d laugh all the way to the bank, because I’d know that even without the click, I can get a meaningful impact, so I’m paying very little for the value I’m getting.”
IAB Canada’s Mixx Canada Conference Series spring event also included a keynote speech by Jascha Franklin-Hodge, an architect of Barack Obama’s online fundraising and grassroots mobilization campaign, as well as addresses by Nathan Goodman of Adnetik, an examination of Doritos’ social marketing initiatives by BBDO Argentina executive Fernando L. Barbella, and a panel discussion on the future of digital marketing.
