Research Reports

Drawing on DoubleClick’s rich history and aggregate campaign performance data, the company’s research team can offer clients deep insights on industry trends, as well as performance metrics and benchmarks. The team aims to offer public and client-facing lessons and ideas to help develop the online marketing industry and improve the efficacy of online marketing. The research group works with DoubleClick clients to provide custom campaign analyses, manage individual client-driven research projects, and offer training and best practices presentations and sessions.

Please feel free to download any of the following research reports. And if you’d like to learn more about DoubleClick research, contact your account manager.


The Brand Value of Rich Media and Video Ads
(June 2009) 

Are you looking to move the needle on branding goals? A new report from DoubleClick and Dynamic Logic can help. This jointly authored report provides detailed information on the impact of ad format selection on branding results. Readers will learn the branding strengths of Image, Rich Media with Video, Rich Media without Video and Simple Flash ad formats. The report covers how each of these formats impacts aided brand awareness, online ad awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent. Plus, readers will get tips and tricks on how to match ad format choice to branding goals.

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DoubleClick Benchmarks Report: 2008 Year-in-Review 
(June 2009) 

Advertisers and agencies have long been asking the questions of their display campaigns, "How do I know whether my campaign is doing well against the industry norms?" and "Are there credible benchmarks I can compare against?" With the release of this report, DoubleClick hopes to address these questions by providing a robust set of benchmark metrics based on data from DART for Advertisers across hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns and tens of billions of ad impressions.
The report covers the year in 2008 findings for click through rates, rich media interaction rates, expansion rates and times and video completes. Benchmarks are further broken down by creative size and creative formats. Here you will also find benchmarks by industry vertical and by country.

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Creative Insights on Rich Media 
(September 2008) 

This report details everything that aggregate ad serving data can tell you about click-through rate, interaction rate, interaction time, expansion rate, expansion time and video complete rate. Each of these metrics can be used as an indicator of success for your rich media campaigns.

In each section, we'll focus on a specific metric of success. We'll show you how the choice of ad format and creative size can affect campaign performance. We'll end each section with industry benchmarks and advice on how to compare your campaign's performance to that of other advertisers in the same industry vertical. (PDF: 476K)

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Invalid Clicks and Online Advertising
(April 2007) 

The term "click fraud" has gained widespread attention in the media and throughout our industry over the past two years. Ad servers and networks do indeed have to protect their customers against not only malicious clicks, but also largely inadvertent invalid clicks arising from robots and spiders in the ad environment that do not obey standard Web server rules and robots.txt files.

This paper outlines the state of invalid clicks in our industry, what DoubleClick is doing to combat invalid clicks, and how to assess the ROI of your click-based online advertising, and in particular search campaigns, for existence and levels of invalid clicking. (PDF: 72.4K)

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Video Ad Benchmarks: Average Campaign Performance Metrics
(February 2007) 

Video is the hottest new format for online advertising. DoubleClick analyzed over 300 video campaigns by 130 advertisers during a four month period of 2006. The objective of this analysis was to identify major trends in the performance metrics of video ad campaigns by industry vertical, ad format, ad size, and ad length. There were several key findings including click through rate for video on average being about five times higher than those for image ads. (PDF: 229K)

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Influencing the Influencers: How Online Advertising and Media Impact Word of Mouth
(December 2006) 

Word of mouth marketing is all the buzz. But how exactly can marketers make it work? As part of our DoubleClick Touchpoints IV consumer survey, we identified a segment of respondents deemed to be "influencers" and studied how they make purchase decisions differently from the rest of us. Key conclusions include they are super media savvy and pay close attention to advertising, both positively and negatively. (PDF: 686KB)

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Touchpoints IV: How Digital Media Fit into Consumer Purchase Decisions
(November 2006) 

DoubleClick Touchpoints IV consumer survey is our fourth annual report about what influences people’s purchase decisions, online and offline, across 15 product and service categories. The findings, based on responses from more than 6,000 U.S. Internet uses, show that consumers are more likely to "view through" an online ad than to click on one, that online video is the most popular online activity of a list of types of emerging media, and that people value online ads more for ongoing learning than discovery. (PDF: 652K)

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Best Practices for Optimizing Web Advertising Effectiveness
(May 2006) 

Twelve years after the first appearance of web-based advertising, the industry now stands as a legitimate heavyweight. Growth rates average over 30% annually; new advertising techniques and opportunities arise daily. More than ever, the influx of advertisers and their dollars creates a need to set your strategies apart. This white paper reveals 10 key insights and advice on how to gain a critical edge in your online advertising initiatives. At the end, further recommended readings will help you get the most out of your online advertising campaigns. (PDF: 686KB)

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