Only 16 Percent of Users Click on Display Ads

The one thing that Yahoo still boasts is a big piece of the display advertising market. Thanks to its many properties and the preference towards big ad banners splattered all over the place Yahoo is making a tidy sum from this type of ads. So much so that Google has been trying, and failing, to get in on the game for quite a while now. But it turns out that display ads are actually becoming much less attractive to the users, at least in several circumstances.

A new study from ComScore found that the number of Internet users who actually click on display ads has halved in the past two years, not that it was such a big percentage to start with. In an earlier study for July 2007, the company found that only 32 percent of users clicked on a display ad in a month. The number has since shrunk considerably to only 16 percent in March 2009. As bad as this seems, it gets worse as only 8 percent of the Internet population accounts for 85 percent of the clicks on display ads, making the click-through rate for display ads somewhat obsolete.

But things aren't as clear cut, as ComScore explains: “Today, marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don’t click on an ad. That’s precisely the wrong thing to do, because other comScore research has shown that non-clicked ads can also have a significant impact,” Linda Anderson, comScore's VP of marketing solutions says.

ComScore instead has found that, despite the low click-through rates, display ads can have a significant impact on the market as measured by other indirect factors. Other studies have found that users exposed to display ads were much more likely to search for the product or the brand advertised and also to visit the company's website. “As a result, savvy marketers are moving to an evaluation of the impact that all ad impressions – whether clicked or not – have on consumer behavior, mirroring the manner in which traditional advertising has been measured for decades using reach and frequency metrics,” Anderson added.