Having a clear picture of one’s reach is essential for effective PPC management. You can encourage conversions or increase brand awareness only among those internet users who are within your reach. But measuring your reach accurately is not so easy. Most of the metrics provide inflated number of unique users rather than giving the true picture.
There are a number of reasons that make measuring ones online reach a difficult task. One of the biggest issues is that internet users make use of various devices like laptops, mobiles and tablets to access the web. So the number of ‘unique viewers’ does not accurately indicate the number of ‘unique people’ within your reach. There is one more problem with using the number of ‘unique viewers’ as an indicator of your online reach –cookie deletion. Once an internet user deletes a cookie, the advertiser is incapable of identifying that the user has already viewed the ad. This results in inaccurate numbers.
A survey on the average rate of third party cookie deletion by web users helped MediaMind come up with a measure for the inflation in plain cookie counting statistics. As the US users deleted cookies more frequently compared to those in Australia and Europe, the inflation factor in the US was the highest. Based on this study, plain cookie counting caused inflation of statistics by following factors in different countries: the US and Canada-3, the UK and Australia-2.6, France-2.3, and Germany and Spain-2.2.
The same study also offered information on the performance of various display ad formats. Commercial breaks came up on the top of the list with highest click through rate (3.12%) as well as dwell rates (46.4%). Floating ads were the second best performers with 3% click though rate and 30% dwell rate.