Beyond CPMs and Clickthroughs: Understanding Consumer Interaction with Web Advertising

Abstract

Measuring effectiveness of online ads is of critical importance to the survival of the Web as an advertiser-supported medium. Present efforts in measuring performance of Web ads are concentrated on adapting measures used in traditional media to the online medium (Novak and Hoffman 1996). However these measures do not take into account the unique interactive characteristics of the medium and hence differences in how consumers process advertising stimuli on the Web. Further ad processing and performance measurement capabilities differ across various advertising formats on the Web. This research proposes a framework to investigate how consumers interact with different advertising formats on the Web and identify metrics that reflect how effectively the ad is processed.

Keywords: advertising, measuring effectiveness, CPMs, Web, consumer interaction