Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
Measuring online advertising is one of the most common issues faced by advertisers who advertise their products and services online. The primary question is how to make sure that the ad you paid for was noticed by those for whom the ad was intended. It is no longer enough for the ad just to be “visible”.
The latest study by IPG Media Lab shows that online ads are not necessarily effective just if they are “visible”. However, the study also shows that as the ad’s visibility increases, so does the attention of consumers.
According to MRC (Media Rating Council) standards, an ad, or rather a banner, is visible if 50 percent of the ad’s pixels were visible for at least one second. As for video ads, the visibility must be at least 50 percent of pixels for two consecutive seconds. For larger ad formats, it’s 30 percent of pixels for one second. MRC has set these standards as a basis on which to establish a set of rules regarding pricing for online ads.
Some agencies have gone beyond the MRC standards of visibility, as they believe that they do not go far enough. However, the MRC claims that these guidelines only set a minimum standard of visibility, setting a lower limit in defining the time someone actually has the opportunity to observe (see) the ad. These standards do not confirm that an ad or a video was actually seen, or more precisely, that the message was received by the users. Therefore, the MRC continues to work on the standardization of the measurement of effectiveness.
Drive Agency, which operates under the I&F McCann Group as part of the global agency network McCann Worldgroup, is able to access all the research and tools of IPG Media Lab and is actively working on the implementation of the conclusions in their daily work in order to provide customers with the best possible service.
“Today’s online users are bombarded daily with different messages and content. Due to the increased volume of content, users’ attention is steadily declining and today the average level of attention is only 8 seconds! The key to success is to grab the user during this attention time span. When planning the distribution of online ads, in addition to the relevance and traffic of sites, we pay more and more attention to the planning and optimization of online ads so that they have the greatest possible visibility, thereby achieving better efficiency and effectiveness for the entire online campaign. Although on local sites in Serbia there is still no possibility of buying only visible online ads, we can work on optimizing the entire campaign with the use of the available tools,” said Dragana Marković, Business Development Manager at the agency Drive. She added: “As we all know that content is king in the marketing world, we could say that relevance, great timing and good ad position is what changes the ultimate outcome of whether our clients’ campaigns are noticed and lead to the desired results. Because all of the above tells us that the number of impressions is no longer a valid campaign target.”
The aim of this study by IPG Media Lab is not to challenge MRC’s existing standards of visibility, but to help advertisers to make ads more effective with regard to standards of visibility. In order to explore the relationship between the visibility and effectiveness of online ads, the research included almost 10,000 participants. The study tested 189 possible advertising solutions that represented different combinations of levels of visibility, type of ad, logo placement and other factors.
Respondents were presented with sites that met their consumer habits. The researchers on this occasion measured the “eye movement” through some of the pages. Each of the subjects received a questionnaire and were asked to respond to the appropriate questions. The conclusion, which didn’t surprise the team from the IPG Media Lab, is that the more visible the ad is, the more likely it is to be noticed by the user. But this is no guarantee that the message has been personalized, revealed the study.
Moreover, the researchers came to the conclusion that if we take into account the MRC standards of visibility, 51 percent of respondents saw the ad, but only 17 percent of them were able to remember it later. On the other hand, for those online ads that exceeded MRC standards of visibility, as many as 74 percent of respondents said they saw the ad, and 32 percent could remember it later.
MRC standards of visibility give equal importance to both criteria, the percentage of pixels of an ad and the amount of time it was visible on the screen. On the other hand the IPG Media Lab study found that the longer the amount of time a consumer has the ability to see the ad, the better the chance that it is remembered, and therefore greater visibility over time means a more effective ad.
This means that for there to be a quarter of the possibility for a consumer to remember a banner, it needs to be within the visible part of the screen for at least four seconds, no matter how great its visibility is. The same possibility is gained for larger ad formats if they are on the screen for at least seven seconds. For video formats, the consumer’s ability to remember them is much higher, ranging from 50 to 70 percent if they are on screen for 7 seconds.
In order to achieve higher effectiveness of online advertising, it is essential that advertisers place their ads where they are more likely to be noticed by the user in the long run. In addition, placing the brand logo at the top of the ad, adding audio to video ads, as well as placing ads on sites that are less-cluttered with other ads, also enables greater effectiveness, according to the IPG Media Lab survey.