Report Stresses Value of Repeat Business for Advertisers

A new industry report from AdKnowledge says that that within 90 days of showing an online ad, fully 48.6 percent of the sales or leads generated by a campaign came from repeat visits, above and beyond the initial visit.

The company’s third quarter Online Advertising Report (OAR) “validates the need for online marketers to track repeat business in order to quantify the true return from online ad campaigns,” AdKnowledge said.

The report is a compilation of Web advertising statistics and trend analyses gathered from the AdKnowledge System and analyzed by the company’s eAnalytics team.

“Last quarter’s OAR demonstrated that click rates are no longer an effective tool to optimize online campaigns,” said Steve Findley, vice president of AdKnowledge eAnalytics, the company’s data mining and analysis arm.

“This quarter’s OAR numbers show the importance of capturing repeat visit information to help determine the true value of a campaign.”

“For sophisticated online marketers today, it is important to calculate the full return from an online campaign, which means capturing repeat visits as well as the brand impact of the advertising — not just clicks or post-click events,” Findley said.

The report also said that CPM rates were flat in the third quarter, in spite of dramatic growth in the supply of ad space. For the third quarter of 1999, CPMs declined less than 1 percent over the proceeding quarter. When compared to Q2’s decline rate of 2.1 percent, this indicates an even more significant leveling off of CPM rates.

The AdKnowledge System includes four components that span planning, campaign buying and trafficking, ad serving and targeting, and reporting. The database contains more than 2,500 ad seeking Web sites and networks, which, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, reaches over 94.1 percent of the overall Web audience.

The full OAR report is available here in PDF format.