AOL Premium Formats: 1H11 Benchmarks and Best Practices

By Sam Duncan, Director of Project Management, Pictela
09/30/11

Call us proud parents, but what Project Devil has achieved in its first year is truly remarkable. As you know, Project Devil celebrated its first birthday this week, and we have a lot to celebrate. After working with more than 60 advertisers and launching over 100 campaigns, we’ve garnered some amazing results and learned some very valuable best practices along the way.

AOL Premium Formats: 1H11 Benchmarks and Best Practices

In Devil's first six months, he achieved some milestones that would make any parent proud:

  • Overall Engagement Rate of 6.91%, more than 4x industry benchmarks
  • Devil campaigns had an average Interaction Rate of 6.71%, 4.7x industry standards
  • We also outperformed standard rich media in Ad Engagement Time with an average of 47 seconds, 3x industry standards

Image galleries, including the Product Showcase and Learn More applications, were the highest performers in the top-most position with Engagement Rates ranging from 7.1% to 12.8%. Use beautiful, high-quality imagery and make sure the first image the user sees is the most effective at drawing their interest. A strong call-to-action will also catch the user’s eye, and ultimately drive them to your site to further engager with your brand.

Video was a popular application in 1H11 that exhibited strong performance. Video tends to have lower Interaction Rates than other applications like the image gallery (due to having less pieces of content), however, consumers often commit more time to the brand when watching video.

Social feeds like Twitter and Facebook are a great way to keep users up to date on your brand and potentially let them know what other users are saying. These two apps perform similarly in the second or third module so they can be used interchangeably as a way to talk directly to your target.

Polls perform well in the second module, and even better in the third. This app is a great choice if you want to get users interacting with the unit. Keeping polls between three and five questions and using visuals helps keep interaction and completion rates high. Polls can also provide consumer insights for advertisers if they ask brand and product related questions.

Keep checking back in Q4 for more Premium Formats benchmarks and best practices.

Source: Devil benchmarks from Devil 1H11 Performance Benchmark Report, AOL Internal Data

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