What’s new with the DoubleClick Benchmarks Report 2009 Year-in-Review

We published the DoubleClick Benchmarks Report in 2009 to give advertisers and agencies a resource to measure their display campaigns’ performance against industry norms. As a result of feedback and interest from our clients and others in the industry, we’re pleased to offer this year’s edition with a couple of updates:

• Data on impressions served through DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) by creative type. Simple flash is the dominant ad format accounting for close to 70% in the U.S. and 85% in the EMEA region. Static image ads was the next most common format representing 20% of the volume through DFA in the U.S. and 10% in the EMEA region.
  
• The availability of a benchmarks report with detailed EMEA region metrics. Last year we included worldwide overall click-through rates and rich media metrics in the report. Now we are pleased to introduce a separate EMEA Benchmarks Report which covers in-depth display benchmarks across a subset of countries in the EMEA region.
  
• Comparison between overall 2008 and 2009 benchmarks. You will also find in this latest report, a month-by-month comparison of benchmark data for click-through rates, interaction rates, expansion rates and interaction time for the years 2008 and 2009.

When reviewing the data we noticed some interesting trends:

• In 2009, the overall click-through rate for the U.S. did not change from 2008 (0.10%) and what’s more is in a month by month comparison of click-through rates (CTRs) from 2008 to 2009 we saw that CTRs were very consistent throughout the year with a minor spike in January -- possibly a result of the post-holiday sale season.
  
• When it comes to CTR, interaction rate, average interaction time and average display time, we did not observe a great difference between U.S. (see page 2) and EMEA (see page 2) benchmarks.
  
• Consistent with last year’s report, we continued to find a correlation between ad size and clicks and interaction rates -- that is, the larger the ad size, the higher the rate. This finding holds true for both U.S. and the EMEA region.

As with last year’s report, the data for these benchmarks are derived from a robust data set across DoubleClick for Advertisers, based on rigorous methodology with input from the Advertising Research Foundation. The report covers benchmarks for the entirety of 2009 by ad format, ad size and industry vertical. The benchmarks are normalized across hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions.

For greater detail on the benchmark data, download the U.S. report here and the EMEA region report here. More in-depth benchmarks by industry are available exclusively to DoubleClick clients so contact your account manager to discuss further.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager