Imagine a meeting to discuss recent marketing campaign results when your media liaison excitedly says, “Your clickthrough rate (CTR) for your online banner ad was GREAT at 0.25 percent.” Do you:

a) Tell them you don’t appreciate sarcasm at a time like that
b) Exuberantly high five them?

For those of you that selected (a), you might like to know that according to a global benchmark report by Mediamind, “Standard Banners—Non-standard Results,” the decline of average CTRs from 2006-2010 stabilized in 2010 at 0.09 percent. That’s right, on average less than 1/10th of a percent of people exposed to a particular display ad click it. Even if you happen to know that “successful” CTRs are still pretty abysmal numbers to throw around. To make matters worse, eMarketer reports another MediaMind study that shows unique visitor analytics need adjusted to account for deleted cookies and individuals accessing via mobile, work and home. Thus advertisers and advertising outlets are scrambling to find better standards of measurement.
So as not to be shocked and appalled at your next digital campaign results debriefing, keep your eyes on these topics:

• Creative Optimization: a type of behavioral targeting to help raise CTR that analyzes the browsing history to populate an ad that is more tailored to that person’s interests (at least according to what their browsing history indicates as an interest). You can develop niche creative knowing it will reach the audience specific to it.
• Dwell Time: a measurable used for rich media ads (which MediaMind’s report indicates have better CTRs than static ads) that indicate how long a user has engaged with an ad. Rolled over an ad that expanded and require you to close it before you can continue reading? The time from interacting until closing that out would determine the Dwell. Standards for these are based on the type of media used (roll-overs, videos, expansion, etc).
• Project Devil: a strategy AOL is putting in place (with the acquisition of display advertising company Pictela) to focus on providing marketers with freedom to create editorial content. This new initiative (so new I’m not sure any of the marketers have bought into it just yet) is what was heralded in the article “AOL Is About to Change the Way Advertisers Measure Success” on Business Insider’s blog. How is it going to be such a game changer? Rather than a banner ad that asks you to click to see the latest and greatest offer, a catalog, video library on products, company info, etc could be viewed directly on the page with the AOL content the user was seeking almost as if embedding a splash page for the brand. Dwell will surely be used to help analyze results once these ads get moving.

It will be interesting to see what happens with AOL’s concept and what analytics will be used to measure those campaigns. So next time you are perusing Popeater for the latest celebrity gossip watch for a page thirty-three percent branded by one advertiser and attempt to make a conscious note if you find yourself engaging with an ad since standards say you most likely aren’t.