How Online Advertising Works: Whither the Click in Europe?

Are low click rates evidence that display ad campaigns have not had any impact on consumer behavior? Or, does online display advertising work in a similar way to traditional offline advertising with multiple exposures over time being needed to effect a change in consumer behavior?

This paper reports the results of Comscore research into online advertising effectiveness based on the use of Comscore's proprietary panel of 2 million Internet users, of which over 400,000 are resident in Europe. The results presented in this paper will show the manner in which online display ads work in affecting European consumer behavior, revealing that there are indeed latency effects and branding effects even when click rates on the ads themselves are minimal. The results observed in Europe will also be compared to those that Comscore earlier measured in the U.S. and which were published in November 2008 in a seminal paper How Online Advertising Works: Whither the Click, which demonstrated the importance of looking beyond ad clicks when assessing the effectiveness of online display ad campaigns. “Whither the Click?” was subsequently published in the June 2009 issue of The Journal of Advertising Research as one of “21 Watertight Laws for Intelligent Advertising Decisions”.