Some Clicks Are More Equal Than Others
Insight manager for marketing at Emap Advertising, Richard Fero, examines the company’s E-ceptivity study, looking at how the different reasons consumers go online impact on online behaviour and receptivity to advertising…
Whilst advertisers are increasingly taking advantage of the online medium for branding campaigns, how much do we really understand about how consumers interact with websites, their moods and behaviours, and how this affects advertising? It seemed to us that whilst the proportion of advertiser budgets going on online campaigns is going through the roof, insight into this area is lagging behind.
Whilst there has been some work on this area, notably from a study conducted by I-Level/Yahoo!, there seemed to be scope for improving our understanding of this increasingly important advertising medium.
The hypothesis we wanted to test was that the reason we go online affects our mood, behaviour and ultimately our responsiveness to ads. Utilising an innovative research methodology, similar to spy-ware, we were able to track (willing) respondents usage of different websites in their own home environment, and also ask those same respondents about their mood and ad take-out whilst surfing. This gave us a unique insight into people’s surfing sessions whilst circumventing many of the problems of measuring people’s behaviour in controlled environments.
Clearly there are hundreds of reasons for going online – far too many to handle, so we categorised them into six clear need states, in order to test our hypothesis. We asked the respondent to tell us why they were online from the following need-states:
(i) Communication – where people exchange messages via instant messaging, email or a phone call over the web
(ii) Transaction – buying or selling something online, banking online
(iii) Specific search – finding something specific and quickly: reading the news, travel information, or finding a specific address or phone number
(iv) In-depth search – product research or hobby based surfing
(v) Entertainment – listening to music, watching videos, playing games, surfing for fun
(vi) Community – meeting others online, talking to people with similar interests, chat rooms, reading online journals
We then began analysing the data we received from our respondents – both click-stream data from the spy-ware that respondents were asked to load onto their machines, and the answers to questionnaires that we were able to pose to respondents whilst they were in the middle of their surfing sessions.
The first finding that came through from our study was that a person’s behaviour differs markedly when consumers are online in different need-states. For example when we’re surfing for entertainment or community reasons we’re more relaxed and happier, have no set motive and are therefore more open to new stimuli.
We also found time spent on surfing sessions varied according to need state: they were longer when people were in entertainment or transaction need states than for community reasons for example. We were also able to delve into the data in a bit more depth to show how respondents were less likely to spend time on any individual pages (page stickiness) when on the web for community reasons, rather than entertainment or in-depth search reasons. Obviously a compelling blog on a social networking site may hold our attention for a while, but we may have to wade through many less interesting pages first before we get there. This has important implications for advertisers, and should be factored into advertiser’s considerations when planning online campaigns.
The next stage of the research was to show whether we could also see any relationships between these need states whilst online, and the effectiveness of advertising. Are people more receptive to certain types of advertising whilst online for these different needs? In traditional media, the relationship between the nature of content, mood, and receptiveness to advertising is well understood, but until now, much planning of advertising within online media has not taken it into consideration.
We looked at advertising in two areas; (i) how well an advert contributed to perceptions about the brand and (ii) how well the advert was able to convert this into action. The methodology we employed enabled us to look at click-stream data to monitor respondents clicking onto particular ads, and we were able to ask the respondents at key times, questions with regards to awareness and recall of advertising. Armed with this data, we had some interesting findings – we saw that the effectiveness of advertising on websites varied considerably depending on the consumer’s need state, with different need states being effective for different measures.
In-depth search, for example, was very effective at getting consumers to respond to advertising (driven by the highly targeted advertising on these sites, which are directly relevant to the search in question). However we saw that in-depth search was not so effective in terms of branding measures – respondents were considerably more likely to respond according to these metrics when in an entertainment or community need state. We also found that respondents in the entertainment need state were also likely to respond to advertising – much more likely to do so than consumers who were in a community need state.
What this research suggests is that there seems to be a place for what we call “attitudinal targeting” on the web – advertisers should consider the frame of mind users will be in when they will see their ad. In understanding this, advertisers will be able to more confidently direct their advertising in environments which will be best suited for their brand.