A new industry report from AdKnowledge says that that within 90
days of showing an online ad, fully 48.6 percent of the sales or leads
generated by a campaign came from repeat visits, above and beyond the initial
visit.
The company’s third quarter Online Advertising Report (OAR) “validates the
need for online marketers to track repeat business in order to quantify the
true return from online ad campaigns,” AdKnowledge said.
The report is a compilation of Web advertising statistics and trend analyses
gathered from the AdKnowledge System and analyzed by the company’s eAnalytics
team.
“Last quarter’s OAR demonstrated that click rates are no longer an effective
tool to optimize online campaigns,” said Steve Findley, vice president of
AdKnowledge eAnalytics, the company’s data mining and analysis arm.
“This
quarter’s OAR numbers show the importance of capturing repeat visit
information to help determine the true value of a campaign.”
“For sophisticated online marketers today, it is important to calculate the
full return from an online campaign, which means capturing repeat visits as
well as the brand impact
of the advertising — not just clicks or post-click events,” Findley said.
The report also said that CPM rates were flat in the third quarter, in spite
of dramatic growth in the supply of ad space. For the third quarter of 1999,
CPMs declined less than 1 percent over the proceeding quarter. When compared to Q2’s decline rate
of 2.1 percent, this indicates an even more significant leveling off of CPM
rates.
The AdKnowledge System includes four components that span planning, campaign
buying and trafficking, ad serving and targeting, and reporting. The database
contains more than 2,500 ad seeking Web sites and networks, which, according
to Nielsen//NetRatings, reaches over 94.1 percent of the overall Web audience.
The
full OAR report is available here in PDF
format.