According to Eyeblaster’s recent “Global Benchmark Report 2009,” rich media ads benefit from things other than size, though banner ads benefit from increased sizes because of increased visibility.
Does size matter?
“Well, yes and no. In Standard Banners, by their nature, size is a large component of the ads’ visibility and therefore affects their performance,” the report notes. “Rich Media ads, on the other hand, have more “dimensions” than two—pixels are augmented by flash, video and expansions that catches the users’ attention. Therefore in Rich Media, size portrays only a part of the performance picture”
The report goes on to detail this notion, conveying findings that larger sizes lead to better performance for standard banners, while for rich media “the picture is more complex” and size is not a reliable indicator of performance as other ad attributes.
Standard banner ads displayed a visible correlation between click-through rates and total pixel size while rich media ads did not.
Eyeblaster notes that “on average, an increase of 50,000 pixels yields and increase of 0.044% in CTR. This is quite an impressive figure, considering that the overall CTR of Standard Banners is 0.1%. Therefore, in Standard Banners, where unit size is one of the major factors to attract users’ attention, increasing unit size is likely to boost CTR performance.”
For rich media, Eyeblaster used Dwell Rate and Dwell Time to measure users’ engagement.
With regards to polite banners, the company found that video increases dwell performance by 71 percent overall.
Expandable strips had the highest interaction rate (13.6 percent) of any rich media format, followed by expandable banners with 8.3 percent and floating ads with 7.8 percent.
Corporate ads designed to raise brand awareness boasted the highest interaction rate among industries at 15.0 percent and also had the highest dwell rate at 15.5 percent.
Apparel followed behind with an interaction rate of 8.3 percent.
Gaming had the highest click-through rate (rich media) at 0.92 percent, while news/media had the highest click-through rate (standard media) at 0.24 percent.
Sources:
http://www.eyeblaster.com/data/uploads/ResourceLibrary/Eyeblaster%20Research%20Global%20Benchmark%20Report%202009.pdf
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/10/20/does-size-matter-in-display-advertising
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007339
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