Consumers spend almost twice as much time engaging with online in-banner video ads than standard banners, a study by ad-serving company Eyeblaster has revealed.
The company’s Trends in Time and Attention Online Advertising report, measured the “dwell time”, or average number of seconds consumers spend engaging with online ads, as an alternative success metric to standard click-through rates. The study, based on a sample of 42 billion rich media impressions across all online ad formats between September 2008 and March 2009, showed that whereas the average click through rate for rich media content (including online video) was 0.35% of total ads served, the dwell rate was 25 times higher at 8.71%, or about 53 seconds of engagement time.
Meanwhile, the average dwell time almost doubled when video ads were compared to non-video banners, from 37.7 seconds to 71.51 seconds.
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.
Time of day was also shown to impact on the level of consumer attention to ads, with dwell rates being the highest in the morning, peaking at 9am, and at lunch time. Both click-through-rates and dwell rates declined later in the evening, with a drop at about 8pm.
