Online ad engagement 25 times higher than click rate

6 August 2009

A study of over 42 billion rich media impressions by Eyeblaster has shown that users are 25 time more likely engage with online advertising than to click on it. Eyeblaster defined engagement using the 'dwell' time metric - The average number of seconds consumers intentionally spend engaging with an online advertisement.

Mick O’Brien, vice president of Eyeblaster, said rich media content has proved to result in the greatest number of conversions for advertisers, and that higher dwell times spark higher conversion rates.

“If advertisers only looking at click throughs they’re only seeing 0.35% of the people coming through to their website but we know from our research that the majority of the conversions do not come from the click through, the majority come from post conversion activity between 30 to 60 days after a consumer has engaged with their online creative,” he said.

Video saw a 30% lift in engagement over non-video banners with dwell time nearly doubling from 37.37 to 71.51 seconds. With more than one in ten users spending over a minute, video banner advertising may be a popular alternative to intrusive pre-roll advertising.

Other key findings from the report were

Time of day user engagement: during workdays dwell rate is the highest in the morning, peaking at 9am. Lunch time has the longest dwell time. There is also an interesting outlier – with insomniacs engaging regularly at 3am.
Nearly 10% of all ads are engaged with for over one and a half minutes. Technology related ads have the highest level of engagement, followed by entertainment and gaming related ads.
Consumers will engage with online ads (on the page as opposed to click away) for longer the TV ads – with attention spans ranging between 15 and 60 seconds longer than those engaged via TV.
Performance of Ad formats: Data reveals messenger ads are the top performing ad format, reaching an average 82.98 seconds compared to rich media rectangles (73.46 seconds), banners (58.71 seconds), skyscrapers (37.57 seconds

Full report available here