comScore has released its 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus report. This annual report examines how the prevailing trends in social media, search, online video, digital advertising, mobile and e-commerce defining the current marketplace and what these trends mean for the year ahead.
“It’s no secret that the online advertising industry has long held the promise of being the most measureable of all media,” writes comScore. Sill, the complex online advertising ecosystem makes validation of delivery difficult. In preparation for this year’s Focus report, comScore conducted a U.S.-based Charter Study in December 2011 involving 12 national brands, 3,000 placements, 381,000 site domains and 1.7 billion ad impressions.
One of the big stories—display ads, which reached 4.8 trillion impressions in 2011, and with powerful targeting capabilities that “deliver more value for advertisers and publishers alike.” comScore expects display ads to be a strong second player to search ads. The leading U.S. publisher of display ads in 2011 was Facebook with more than 1.3 trillion impressions (27.9 percent market share)—thus, one in four online display ads—and Yahoo! Sites second at 529 billion impressions.
So behavioral targeting counts for more on the Internet than demographics in significance. Fully 73% of impressions clocked in the Charter Study were targeted based on behavioral attributes, not simply age, gender or household income. But, of the audience-targeted placements evaluated in the study, delivery ranged from 14- 96%, suggesting flaws in cookie-based audience targeting and substantiating a need for validation.
Across all charter campaigns measured, 69% of ad impressions were classified as being in-view. The remaining 31% were delivered but never seen by a consumer, a likely result of a consumer scrolling past the ad before it loaded or a consumer never scrolling the ad into view. In-view percentages varied by site and ranged from 7% to 91%.
Where, then, to place those ads? comScore reports these findings as well:
- Social Networking (chiefly on Facebook) accounted for 16.6% of online minutes at the end of 2011 and is on track to surpass portals as the most engaging online activity in 2012. Facebook continues to lead as the driving force behind this shift in consumer behavior, accounting for the largest share of online minutes across the entire web in 2011.
- Google maintains a strong lead in the U.S. search market, but Bing had a strong upward trajectory in 2011. Bing closed out the year by surpassing Yahoo! for the #2 position among core search engines for the first time in its history, bolstered in part by its social search partnership with Facebook implemented in early 2011.
- Online video is changing the ecosystem. It saw impressive gains in 2011, signaling a behavioral shift in how Americans are consuming video content. More than 100 million Americans watched online video content on an average day to close out 2011, representing a 43% increase versus a year ago.
- Smartphones and tablets are fueling the “digital omnivore.” In 2011, the majority of all mobile phone owners consumed mobile media on their device, marking an important milestone in the evolution of mobile from primarily a communication device to also a content consumption tool. At the end of the year, more than 8% of digital traffic was consumed beyond the “classic web” via devices such as smartphones and tablets.
