AOL Premium Formats: Benchmarks and Best Practices for Retail

By Sam Duncan, Director of Project Management, Pictela
09/16/11

As the one-year anniversary of Project Devil’s release quickly approaches, we at AOL Premium Formats wanted to share some of the amazing results and best practices that we’ve learned throughout the last year. With Fashion Week coming to a close yesterday, I thought it only appropriate to start with our Retail findings.

AOL Premium Formats: Benchmarks and Best Practices for Retail

Retailers like Macy’s effectively use Premium Formats, and we’re excited to see other retailers bring interactive and vivid imagery straight to their consumers in the best way possible.

Retail has come to be one of the highest performing categories within Premium Formats. With an Interaction Rate of 11.5%, the Retail Devil unit outperforms standard rich media by 8x. Retail sees one of the highest CTR’s for Devil units across all sales categories at 0.56%, 3.7x more than the industry average.

Here are some Retail-specific tips to keep those interaction metrics high:

  • The first and third modules attract the highest levels of interaction, so favor applications where the user can deeply engage
  • The Product Showcase, an image gallery with hotspots to reveal product details, is the highest performing application. Try it in the first module.
  • An image gallery should include at least 4 eye-catching images with 2-3 hotspots apiece, but don’t use more than 10 images.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that assets from this category promote further consideration through clicking; think about using applications that promote click-through like the Learn More image gallery, Polls, Quizzes, and Content Feeds. 

The Video app performs particularly well, especially in the second and third modules.  We recommend it for distributing your TV spots, runway videos, or fashion how-to tips. The Store Locator also gets users engaging—and can help you drive more customers in-store.

Check back next Thursday for more Premium Formats benchmarks and best practices in other categories.

 

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

Keywords: Premium Formats, Best Practices

Share