Links emerge between task completion and online advertising effectiveness

Cross-posted at the 4Q website survey blog.

In the wake of the depressing ad revenue figures put out last week by the IAB, here's some cheerful news for sellers of online advertising.

Visitors who complete their onsite tasks tend to be far more positively disposed towards the ads that they see. This comes directly from real survey results for media/publishing clients currently running iPerceptions' webValidator Continuous Listening Solution. Our data showed that visitors who completed their primary onsite tasks were 17 percentage points more likely to indicate that the messages put forward in the ads they saw were relevant and 14 percentage points more likely to indicate that the messages put forward were credible (see tables). This phenomenon was particularly acute among the valuable yet increasingly scarce segment of visitors in the $100k + annual household income bracket.

Since the relevance and credibility of online advertising units are traditionally two big predictors of clickability and recall, the implications for both buyers and sellers of online advertising are huge. This is a life line to sellers in a time of crumbling CPMs. Sellers now have a clear interest in optimizing their websites to boost task completion, a process that will make their ad inventory that much more salable. On the flip side, ad buyers will need to keep an eye out on publishers' website task completion scores to maximize the ROI of their spend.