Last Tuesday, we presented our first display insight from the DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool around increasing engagement and interaction rates. Today, we’re continuing our “Display Insights” series with our second nugget: 

Different types of rich media ads are better suited for different campaign goals. 
While you may ideally want to have high engagement rates and times for every ad you create, there are most likely times when you care more around getting people to engage frequently and other times when you care more about getting them to engage for a long time. The data from the DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool suggests that different rich media formats may be better suited for different campaign goals. 

If you’re goal is to maximize:
  • Click-through rate: use mobile ads, or larger ad sizes
  • Interaction rate: use expanding formats, or larger ad sizes
  • Interaction time: use in-page ad formats
  • Video completions: use in-page ad formats
In general, larger ad sizes and expanding formats lead to a higher frequency of interaction, while in-page ad formats lead to a longer interaction time. In addition, mobile ads seem to be the best type of ad format at driving click-through rate: the average click-through rate for mobile display ads is between two and six times greater than that of the other formats. 

So what?
By understanding which types of ad formats and sizes work best for which metrics, you can better optimize your creative strategy so that you’re maximizing the metrics you care about. For example, for an ad unit that is primarily meant to generate brand awareness, you might care mainly about getting as many people to interact with the ad as frequently as possible. If there isn’t a ton of ad content for them to engage with, you don’t need them to spend a ton of time on the ad. In this case, you might use an expanding rich media ad in a large size, like the billboard or skyscraper ad size, since these units maximize interaction frequency.

However, you might have another ad unit that includes multiple panels of information about your brand as well as a demo video of your product. In this case, you care about people spending time on your ad and engaging with all of your content. So for these ads you might want to use the rich media in-page format which maximizes interaction time. 

Both of these examples illustrate how you can optimize your creative strategy and output to align with the goals you’re hoping to achieve for each part of your campaign.

Join us next week for the third installation in our “Display Insights” series, where we'll begin to explore the opportunities in video advertising, and check out the DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool to experiment with the data yourself.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick