Natural Born Clickers

Just 8% of Internet users account for 85% of all clicks. Of course we all know that the Pareto Effect (80:20) applies in most areas of business but I have never thought of it in terms of clicks. Why should I be surprised – but I am.

comScore researched this topic a couple of years back and has just updated the results. It shows that the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32% of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8% of the Internet user base) accounting for 85% of all clicks.

In 2007, comScore found that ‘Heavy’ clickers, representing 6% of U.S. Internet users and accounted for the top 50% of clicks. ‘Moderate’ users, 10% of Internet users accounting for 30% of the clicks, and ‘Light’ clickers, 20% of users producing 16% of the clicks. By March 2009, these numbers had changed substantially as you can see from the table.

comScore VP of marketing solutions and author of the study, made the very reasonable conclusion: "... marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84% of Internet users who don't click on an ad... "

If anybody needed evidence that for most display ad campaigns, the click-through is not the most appropriate metric for evaluating campaign performance. Rather, advertisers should consider evaluating campaigns based on their view-through impact. Good stuff that applies to all ages. Dick Stroud