source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Marketers-Put-More-Work-Hands-of-In-House-Agencies/1010228
Cost-cutting drives changes
A growing contingent of client-side marketers are turning to in-house agencies to take more ownership of their advertising and marketing strategy.
According to an Association of National Advertisers (ANA) survey, 58% of US client-side marketers said their company used an in-house agency this year, compared to only 42% who five years earlier said the same. And 56% of respondents said in May 2013 that in the past three years, they had moved at least some established business previously handled by an external agency to their in-house agency.

Magazine advertising, social media, online display advertising and search engine marketing were the services most commonly handled by an in-house agency, according to the study. The proliferation of digital marketing channels may be convincing companies to move more marketing in-house, so they can be more responsive and create a full breadth of material at lower cost. Still, only small percentages of in-house agencies handled most of these services, indicating that much work still sits squarely with external agencies.
Traditional TV and radio advertising were the least likely formats to be handled in-house.

Marketers cited cost savings as the most significant advantage of bringing agency work in-house in 2008. This year, it remained the top advantage, however one cited by far fewer respondents.
Five years earlier, more than half of marketers saw cost efficiencies as an in-house agency’s primary advantage, whereas in! 2013, that figure had dropped to 35%. Other factors instead took on greater precedence: 19% of marketers cited brand expertise, as well as institutional knowledge and the added benefit of a team dedicated to the company or brand. This indicates that marketers have become more satisfied by the quality of work created by in-house agencies.
But the disadvantages also stacked up. Forty-five percent of the survey respondents said it would not be as easy to stay on top of key trends with an in-house agency. That was more than the percentage of marketers who saw this as a challenge in 2008, and suggests that digital channels amplify the importance of understanding the latest marketing opportunities. Creative innovation was also seen as more lacking when agencies moved in-house, along with limited skill sets among the staff.

The digital marketing age seems to be forcing marketers to navigate between two competing impulses—the need to produce more marketing than ever before across ever-proliferating channels is making in-house agencies particularly attractive. But the skills needed to effectively leverage and communicate via these channels are still often seen as best handled by agencies fully dedicated to the advertising and marketing space.
Tags: added benefit, association of national advertisers, breadth, contingent, digital marketing, display advertising, efficiencies, institutional knowledge, marketers, marketing channels, marketing-strategy, percentages, precedence, proliferation, radio advertising, respondents, search engine marketing, work hands
UPDATED: April 10, 2012
AdSafe study shows that a quarter of display ads are never in view on publishers’ websites. And it gets worse from there — 41% never in view for content networks and 46% never in view for ad exchanges. Users are there to view content, not ads. And they are conditioned to avoid the top, right side, and bottoms of web pages (see eye tracking at the bottom of this post).
Image Source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1008965
ORIGINAL POST: March 25, 2011
Hands down, search ads beat display ads in click through rates (CTRs). In every one of the examples below and the several dozen more that I did not screen shot, search is more effective than display because the ads are brought up when the user types in the search term and are looking for something, vs display which is served up alongside content.

Facebook display advertising click through rates are even sadder (i.e. worse) as you can see from the chart below — like an order of magnitude
lower (0.024%)



digital display vs search ads
Eye tracking studies show that most users are already conditioned to avoid looking at the top and right side of web pages because they know that is where banner ads or display ads go.

Tags: AdSafe, advertising, alignleft, attachment, banner, banner ads, bottoms, caption, chart, click, content, content networks, CTRs, display, display advertising, dozen, eye, eye tracking, Facebook, Hands, Image, magnitude, March, march 25, nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp, order, order of magnitude, search, search ads, search term, shot, side, something, Study, term, top, user, web pages, width
Update Jan 2014
Summary
Facebook click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% (Facebook CTRs)
Facebook effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 (Facebook eCPMs)
Facebook average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25 (Facebook CPCs)
Other social media benchmarks from my experiments (Adwords, StumbleUpon, PayPerPost / Izea) can be found here.
As a scientist, I like to run experiments. And I like to make stuff. So my team and I made a few Facebook apps that solved needs that we had (a few samples listed below) and shared them publicly on Facebook to see if they were also useful to other people too.
I beta tested some apps with a few friends by inviting them directly. Then to get it out to a larger number of people, we decided to try Facebook advertising, the much-hyped, holy grail of display advertising on one of the largest and most active social networks.
– visual discovery, share, and queue management interface for Netflix
– visual discovery and sampling interface for music (Amazon backend)
– create and send photo or video e-cards by drag and drop (Flickr and YouTube backend)
– visual display of your friends (closest ones have the most recent status updates)
– social commerce – I’ll buy what he bought; things I have, things I want
But what I found was eye-opening to say the least. Despite the potential of social ads where the social actions of your circle of friends could make the ads more targeted, none of the anticipated positive effects were observed. Despite the promise of mass reach, there was not the corresponding attention or clicks. And despite the use of demographics-based targeting, there was no statistically significant difference between different targets nor the control sample, running during the same time period.
What we saw were click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% — and the 0.01% often seemed like rounding because they did not report more than 2 decimal places. As a result of these click rates the effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 and average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25. I’ve been running these Facebook ads for more than 12 months; and millions of impresisons later, there is no observable improvements to CTRs and thus CPMs and CPCs. But since I set up the campaigns to only pay when there is a click (CPC basis), I can let these run indefinitely because I am getting so few clicks, it’s not even making a dent on my credit card (which I use to pay for the ads).

detail of low click through rates of facebook display ads
Ideas for Facebook
In the spirit of openness, as an advertiser who wants to continue using Facebook advertising, perhaps there are a few things they can do to improve the effectiveness of Facebook display ads.
1. reduce the number of ads per page to 1 — displaying multiple ads artificially depresses click-through rates because users can only click on 1 thing at a time, even if they liked more than one of them. Displaying 3 on a page simply increases the denominator while the numerator does not increase — in the click-through rate equation: clicks / impressions.
2. make ads sharable – in the rare instance a user views an ad, it may or may not be relevant to her, but she may know that it is relevant and timely for a friend. By making ads sharable, she can click and send to a friend, who is very likely to find it useful and valuable, especially having been sent by a friend.
3. let users opt-in to ads in specific topic categories – when users are in the market for specific things, they are more likely to subscribe to pertinent news feeds, offers, etc. related to that topic or category. By giving users more power over what they want to see, it will also give advertisers more targeted and engaged prospects to target.
4. expand search-based advertising – when users search they are looking for something and are open to discovering something they didn’t know to ask for. So ads served up in response to a search is usually a lot more effective than ads served up simply when a page is loaded (display advertising). Facebook can serve display ads based on pertinent search queries.
Earth to Facebook… anyone listening?
By Dr. Augustine Fou. Dr. Fou is Group Chief Digital Officer at Healthcare Consultancy Group a group of agencies within the Omnicom family specializing in pharma and healthcare. He helps clients develop digital marketing programs or improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness existing campaigns via advanced analytics, social marketing, and digital strategy. You can read more of his writing on digital marketing on this blog and follow him on twitter @acfou.
Excerpt from TechCrunch: “Click fraud is serious business on the big search engine advertising networks because the bad guys can make serious money. Sign up for an Adsense account and put those ads on parked domain names or wherever. Then all you have to do is start clicking those ads like crazy, using bots or cheap labor.” On Facebook, “advertisers are clicking on competitor ads to drive up their costs and drive down their ROI.”
“So the bad guys just create thousands of fake Facebook accounts with a wide variety of demographic information. This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s highly automated. the going rate was just $10 per 100 accounts if you supply the unique email accounts. Once the accounts are created, they use software to fill out the varied demographic information, and that software also manages all these accounts. The fraudster then logs in to Facebook via these accounts and views the ads that are displayed. The right competitive ads come up and Bingo, the software then clicks them. Facebook rules allow an account to click any advertisement up to six times in a 24 hour period, and all those clicks are charged. All you need is a few accounts to view the ads and then click to the max.”
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/facebook-click-fraud-101/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/21/facebook-admit-click-fraud-problem-says-fix-coming-today/
Despite click fraud, the click through rates are still incredibly low. So if you subtract all the click fraud, is ANY advertiser making ANY money from facebook advertising?
Others have found similarly dismal click through rates from Facebook advertising
Source: http://www.friendswithbenefitsbook.com/2008/04/07/facebook-ad-click-through-rates-are-really-pitiful/
Facebook Ad Click-Through Rates Are Really Pitiful
April 7, 2008 – 5:03 pm
Quite by coincidence, I’ve encountered a few statistics on Facebook’s advertising platform. I thought I’d post links to the results I’ve uncovered, in case anybody is wondering about average CTR rates for Facebook.
First up, Rod Boothby got a click-through rate of 0.01%:
This week, I ran $105 worth of Facebook Fliers. That bought me 52,500 impressions. It looks like the flier bought me about an extra 500 site visits. That’s about $0.21 per hit.
Michael Ferguson ran a bunch of Facebook ads for Kinzin:
Click-through rates are abysmal. I was running the identical ad in about 15 different regions (you need to run them as separate ads to get the stats broken out), getting just over 10M views. Our average clickthrough rate was 0.06% (that’s 1 in 1513, for those counting at home). The best we did anywhere was 0.14%.
He later reports that the conversion rate was “at a pretty reasonable clip” at about 5%. By ‘conversion’, I think he’s meaning people who actually signed up for Kinzin’s free service. All of this stuff is contextual, but if visitors had to lay down money, the conversion rate would be considerably lower.
The folks at Valleywag report similarly dismal numbers:
Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They’re mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for eachother to show much interest in advertising. Facebook’s members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.
From AllFacebook:
Fred Wilson has been updating the world about his venture in Facebook advertising over the past week. Today, Fred posted and updated screenshot of his ad campaign’s performance and it doesn’t appear to be too stellar. For one of his campaigns, out of 10,080 impressions there were only 8 clicks. The average cost-per-click for Fred was $0.08 and the average CPM was $0.06. This is a less than stellar performance. This is nothing new though.
And lastly, from a digital student marketing blog in the UK. This would seem like a natural fit for Facebook’s audience:
Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.
Click-through rates seem to sit around 0.04%, which is profoundly lame if you ask me. I’m no online advertising expert–it’s not really our thing–but I’ve run a bunch of Google AdWords and other contextual advertising campaigns. We regularly get click-through rates of 3%, and I gather that’s nothing special.
Here’s my theory on Facebook: it’s a silo. People visit the Fun House of Facebook, and conceptually treat it slightly different than the rest of the web. They’re in Facebook, interacting with friends, playing games, sending messages and now chatting on IM. As such, they’re really unmotivated to leave. Who wants to leave the Fun House?
We’ve seen similar results across Facebook. It’s really difficult to drive visitors out of the app and to your own website.
Tags: a good click through rate, Abysmal Click-Through Rates, ad ctr, ads on facebook cost, advertise facebook, advertise here banner, advertise on facebook, advertisement on facebook statistics, advertising, advertising and facebook, advertising click-through benchmarking, advertising cost on facebook, advertising ctr, advertising effective, advertising effectiveness on facebook, advertising facebook, advertising in facebook, Advertising metrics, advertising on facebook, advertising through facebook, advertising tips, advertising with facebook, Adwords, adwords average ctr, Amazon, amazon average cpm, apps, attention, augustine fou, augustine fou blog, automated click fraud, average ad price for facebook, average ad price on facebook, average advertising response rates, average click rate on facebook ads, average click shared content on facebook, average click through rate facebook, average click through rate Facebook ads, average click through rate for facebook, average click through rate for facebook ads, average clicks per facebook app, average cost facebooks clicks, average cost of Facebook ad, average cost per click facebook, average cost per click facebook ad, average cost per click for facebook, average cost per click for facebook ads in Indonesia, average cost per click rates, average cost per month to serve display ads, average CPC facebook, average cpc facebook ads, average CPC for Facebook, average CPCs, average cpm click through rate, average cpm cpc, average cpm facebook 2010, average CPM on Facebook, average ctr "LinkedIn", average ctr facebook, average ctr facebook 2009, average ctr facebook ads, average ctr on facebook, average CTR on facebook ad network, average ctr on facebook ads, average display click through rates, average facebook ad cost, average facebook ad costs, average facebook ad ctr, average facebook ad price, average facebook ads cost, average facebook advertising costs, average facebook campaign costs, average facebook click through rate, average facebook click through rates, average facebook cost per click, average facebook cpc, average facebook CTR, average healthcare click through rates, average metrics facebook ads, average number of pages per facebook visit, average pcp for facebook, backend, banner ads rates, banner advertising cpm, benchmark cpc facebook, Benchmark Facebook, benchmark for impressions for an ad campaig..., Benchmark share rates on Facebook fan page, benchmarking facebook, benchmarking facebook apps, benchmarking in social marketing, benchmarks, Benchmarks facebook, benchmarks facebook ads, benchmarks for facebook ads, Best Facebook CTR, Best Facebook CTR You Have Seen?, beta, campaign effectiveness useful metrics, Chief Digital, circle, click, click farm, click fraud, click per impressions facebook ads, click rate on facebook ads, click through rate, click through rate facebook, click through rates on facebook ads, click throughs, Clickthrough rate in facebook, commerce, comparison, control, cost effectiveness of facebook ads, cost facebook ads, cost of making a facebook ad, cost per advertising in facebook, costs for facebook advertising, CPCs, cpcs card photo, cpm ad, cpm ad rate, cpm advertising by demographic, cpm advertising networks, cpm advertising rates, cpm banner ads, cpm benchmarks, cpm ctr, cpm ctr cpc, CPM digital benchmarks, cpm facebook average, CPMs, crm on facebook, CTR - Clickthrough Rates on Facebook CPC Ads, ctr ad metrics, ctr click through rate, ctr cpm, ctr facebook, CTR facebook ads, ctr in facebook, ctr on facebook, CTRs, decimal places, difference, difference between click and impression on ..., difference between conversions and actions in facebook ads, digital marketing, discovery, display, display advertising, Dr. Fou, drag, drag and drop, e cards, effective cost per thousand for facebook, effective CPMs, effective facebook ads, effective facebook advertising, effectiveness of advertising on facebook, effectiveness of facebook ads, effectiveness of facebook advertising, email marketing metrics benchmarks 2009, Examples of Advertisement Benchmarking, expected facebook ads ctr, facebok ctr, Facebook, facebook ad, facebook ad average ctr, facebook ad benchmarks, facebook ad campaign, facebook ad campaign rates, facebook ad click through rate, facebook ad click thru rate, facebook ad cost, facebook ad cpc, facebook ad ctr, facebook ad effectiveness, facebook ad effectiveness statistics, facebook ad impressions, facebook ad in increse in impression, facebook ad metrics, facebook ad rates, facebook ad response rate, facebook ad specs, facebook ads, facebook ads Actions Rate, facebook ads ad board, facebook ads api, facebook ads average cpc, facebook ads average ctr, facebook ads click rate, facebook ads click through rate, facebook ads cost, facebook ads cpm, facebook ads cpm rates, facebook ads CTR, facebook ads dismal click throughs, facebook ads effective, facebook ads effectiveness, facebook ads effectiveness 2010, facebook ads examples, facebook ads impressions, facebook ads impressions vs clicks, facebook ads KPI, facebook ads low ctr, facebook ads market cpm rate, facebook ads metrics, facebook ads price, facebook ads pricing, facebook advertising, Facebook Advertising Benchmarks, facebook advertising click rate, facebook advertising click through rate, facebook advertising clicks, facebook advertising clicks impressions exp..., facebook advertising cost, facebook advertising costs, facebook advertising effective, facebook advertising effectiveness, facebook advertising guidelines, facebook advertising impressions, facebook advertising kpi, Facebook advertising metrics, facebook advertising price, facebook advertising rates, facebook advertising software, facebook advertising tips, FACEBOOK ADVERTISING VS GOOGLE ADSENSE MOVI..., facebook adverts ctr rates, facebook and advertising, facebook and marketing, facebook application benchmarks, facebook avarage ctr, facebook average ad impressions seen per user, facebook average CPC, facebook average CPCs, facebook average cpm 2010, Facebook Average CTR, facebook avg ctr, Facebook Benchmark, facebook benchmark ctr, facebook benchmarking, facebook benchmarks, facebook business, Facebook Click Fraud, facebook click through rate, facebook click through rates, facebook click through rates ghana, facebook clickthrough rate, facebook cost cpm, facebook cpc advertising, facebook CPC rates, Facebook CPCs, facebook CTR, facebook ctr average, facebook ctr benchmark, facebook ctr rates, Facebook CTRs, facebook display advertising, Facebook eCPMs, facebook effective CPMs, facebook for advertising, facebook fraud metrics, facebook good click through rate, facebook impressions vs clicks, facebook kpi, facebook marketing, facebook marketing rates, facebook metrics, facebook pay per click, facebook statistics, facebook stats, facebook stats and metrics, facebook stats on cpm, facebook targeted advertising effectivness, facebook what's a good cpm rate?, facebook's advertising costs, faecbook metrics, flickr, flickr advertising costs, Fraud, friend, good click through rate facebook, good click through rate for facebook, good click through rate percentage facebook ads, good ctr facebook, good CTR for facebook ads, good facebook ads, good facebook click through rate, good facebook ctr, good kpi's for a facebook app, google ads ctr, google ctr, grail, Group, hat is a good ctr rate on a facebook add, healthcare, holy grail, how do facebook ads work, how effective are facebook ads, how effective facebook advertising, how to google ads, how to lower costs on facebook advertising, how to make money on facebook, how to run effective facebook ads, hyped, improve ctr, increase click through rate, increase your clickthrough rate on facebook, interface, inurl:blog intext:facebook ad, is advertising on facebook effective, Is Facebook Advertising Effective, izea, lot, make money on facebook, making money on facebook, management, management interface, marketing, marketing facebook, marketing in facebook, marketing on facebook, mass, metrics for facebook ads, metrics what do advertisers look for, music, nasdaqgoog, Netflix, none, number, page, paid per click, pay per click advertising cost, pay per click facebook, pay per click how to, pay per click on facebook, pay per click through, PayPerPost, photo, potential, price of facebook ad, promise, queue, reach, rich media banner ads, ROI, same time period, sample, scientist, search, search facebook ads, share, So Few Clicks, So Many Ads, social actions, social ads, social marketing benchmarks, social media benchmarks, social media kpi, social media response rate benchmark, social networks, something, status, status updates, stuff, StumbleUpon, successful facebook ads, summary, team, time, topic, typical click through rate facebook, typical click through rate facebook cpm, typical ctr for ads on facebook, use, video, viral advertising metrics, visual discovery, what are click rates for facebook ads, what is a good click through rate in facebook ads, what is a good click through rate on facebook, what is a good ctr for facebook ad, what is a good ctr for facebook ads, what is a good cTR for facebook CPC, what is a good CTR on facebook, what is a good ctr on facebook ads, what is a good facebook click through rate, what is a good facebook ctr, what is average ctr for facebook ads, what is average facebook CTR, what is click through rate, what is considered good CTR on facebook ads, what is facebook advertising, what is pay per click, whats a good click rate for facebook ads, whats a good click through rate, whats a good click through rate facebook, whats a good click through rate on facebook, whats a good ctr facebook, whats a good ctr for facebook ad, whats a good ctr on craigslist, whats a good ctr on ebay, whats a good ctr on facebook, whats a good ctr on facebook ad impressions, whats a good ctr on facebook banner, whats a good ctr on facebook conversion rate, whats a good ctr on gmail, whats a good ctr on google, whats a good ctr on hotmail, whats a good ctr on msn, whats a good ctr on myspace, whats a good ctr on twitter, whats a good ctr on yahoo, whats a good ctr on yahoo mail, whats a good ctr on youtube, whats a good ctr online, whats the average cost for a facebook ad, whats the average ctr in facebook, worst Facebook CTR, YouTube
Why the Click Is the Wrong Metric for Online (Display) Ads
There is a whole ruckus around ad networks getting too little credit for helping to drive customers’ awareness and clicks for advertisers. In the past, ad networks wanted to claim credit for type-ins (people going to an advertiser’s site by typing the URL instead of clicking on an ad). They called this “view through” and the ad networks wanted these to be attributed to their showing the ad somewhere on their network.
Now they claim that getting credit for only the last-ad is not enough — the ad the user actually clicked on to get to the advertiser’s site, the one that can actually be tracked and properly attributed.
What’s at stake is the relatively large piece of “direct” or referrer-less traffic. Analytics packages can only assign these to type-ins or bookmarks since there was no referring site to attribute them to, let alone ad creative version, etc.
But while there is demonstrable lift in click rates when display ads and search ads are running at the same time — i.e. they reinforce and complement each other — it does not mean that ad networks can or should claim credit for the lift. After all, advertising running on another network COULD also cause a lift in results of ads running on another network if they are run simultaneously.
So the bottom line is if the click or the visit is not directly attributable, it should not be attributed.
Tags: ad attribution, ad metrics, ad networks claim credit, adage, advertiser, advertisers, advertising, analytics, article article, article id, awareness, bottom line, COULD, credit, digital article, display, display ad networks, display ads, display advertising, ins, last-ad accounting, last-ad-attribution model, lift, line, low click through rates, Metric, network, no referrer click, online, past, piece, problem of attribution, referrerless click, ruckus, search, search ads, site, stake, targeting, time, traffic, URL, user, version, view, view through, visit