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Date:29 June 2012

Clickers buy more!

London (June 26, 2012) – Criteo (www.criteo.com), the global leader in performance display advertising solutions, today released a research study from its Business Intelligence Group, which  unequivocally establishes a strong correlation between those who click and those who buy. As such the study proves for the first time that a click on an online banner advert is a genuine expression of purchase intent.

For the last decade the online industry has been split between Search and Display advertising. In search, where Google alone generates more than $40Bn revenue/year, the entire industry is measured and paid only when a user clicks on an ad. In the display world, by contrast, the $33B industry has generally placed little value on the click and argued that measuring the browser's "view" of a banner ad is much more important. A 2008 study by comScore, entitled Whither the Click, argued that clickers on display ads are “hardly an attractive target segment for most advertisers.”

However, this new study; “Measuring the Value of Users Who Click on Online Display Ads”, re-appraises this view and clearly establishes a strong link between clicking on a banner ad and purchasing the advertised product. As such it confirms that online customers do click on banner ads, and that they do buy products as a result – overturning the misconception that banner advertising is ineffective at driving sales.  

“It has always seemed strange that clickers should be so valuable in a search context, and yet irrelevant for banner advertising. It is therefore reassuring that this new research demonstrates that clickers are highly valuable in display advertising as well, at least for any advertiser looking ultimately to sell something,” said Pascal Gauthier, Chief Operating Officer at Criteo.  “This huge study demonstrates that clickers buy much more than non-clickers, and that the more a user clicks, the more they buy.”

The study, conducted by Criteo’s Business Intelligence Group in early March 2012, investigated the online shopping behavior of millions of users in order to demonstrate the value of the audience that clicks on performance display ad campaigns. It analyzed over $11B of e-Commerce transactions and anonymised data from 142 million users to whom a Criteo ad was shown.

“There is a common though misguided belief among many marketers that very few people click on online display ads and those that do are not the kind of people to advertise to,” said Patrick Wyatt, head of business intelligence at Criteo. “Normally, marketers go to great lengths to get responses from customers, using the marketing channels in which they invest. So before writing off the click, it is worth taking a second look.  What we found does much to counteract some of the myths that surround click-based advertising.”

About Criteo
Criteo is the global leader in Performance Display.  Thanks to Criteo, advertisers can reach more customers with the same return-on-investment as they get from search marketing.  Every day Criteo generates millions of high-quality leads through dynamically generated ads which are personalised with the products and services that consumers are searching for.
 
Criteo is measured purely on its post-click performance and offers a turnkey pay-per-click model including extensive real-time bidding tools, category and product level optimisation and an in-house creative studio.  
 
Criteo partners with over 2000 leading ecommerce brands and operates in 30 countries across America, Europe and Asia.  For more information, please visit http://www.criteo.com.