Are You a “Natural Born Clicker?”

Comscore yesterday released a report on Display Advertising. Some interesting and more importantly not encouraging findings were reported. First off 6% of internet users make up over 50% of the clicks on Banner ads. Additionally, this 6% is mostly male, between the ages of 25-44 and make less than $40,000/yr (hardly representative of the typical internet user). Also, these individuals even though they spend 4xs as much time online as a typical internet user, their spending online is not proportionate.

That information is certainly disconcerning for those companies that advertise with banners on a CPM basis. But, probably most disappointing is this information from the report.

Further preliminary Starcom data suggests no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and show no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked. The research presentation suggests that when digital campaigns have a branding objective, optimizing for high click rates does not necessarily improve campaign performance.

This is only one study that was done, and by no means does it represent all banner campaigns, but it certainly should make you reevaluate all of your banner campaigns. Is this report, that is the first step to having all online advertising on a CPA basis?