To many in the online marketing industry the newest ComScore report on the 21% increase in display advertisement impressions means nothing when you couple it with the October 2009 report showing a 50% drop in users that actually click-through. Going further we find that only 8% of internet users account for 85% of all reported click-throughs. What does this mean? It means Big problems for the future of online advertising.

The decline in click-through rate (CTR), purchases and revenue is not only bad for us in online marketing but it’s also bad for everyday internet users and consumers looking to order goods or services online. For marketers, it’s bad because we’re not generating a) enough revenue to justify our salaries, b) the necessary number of leads to generate and retain new business and c)enough sales to keep our agencies afloat in these tough economic times.

For every day users, the results are less economical and more degrading on experience. Users are affected negatively because the revenue that isn’t generated from display ads has to be made up somewhere, so it’s creating an invasive, deceptive sales environment that creates more and more of a stigma against those in our profession. In addition, more and more users are beginning to ignore advertisements altogether. Why? Most likely it’s because they’re not creative, obtrusive and invasive (opinion). The future of online advertising can’t be all grim and bleak, can it? Not if we make changes… drastic changes.

“Marketing 101″ tells us that we need to create compelling, attractive content to draw the attention of our audience and today the most common practice in determining that is by rolling up our sleeves and digging into quantitative metrics like number of impressions, clicks and CTR. Quantitative metrics have been used since measurement became important and I’ve been using the same techniques since managing my first website in the late 90′s. Could it be a coincidence that internet users have just now become desensitized to display advertising or could our age-old method of measuring quantity over quality be obsolete? Personally, I think it’s the latter.

Working in (and loving) a  fast-paced ad agency setting, I tend to get caught up in the “I needed it done yesterday”  environment. Every once in a while, however, I find myself thinking about something that my 4th grade teacher used to say to my classmates and I: “focus on quality over quantity”. Maybe she was on to something- so much emphasis is placed on impressions and CTR that we forget about the main goal of appealing to consumers. We piece together flashy ads with hard-selling, direct response copy filled with calls to action and think little on the impact it has on user experience. What if a user sees the ad but is so repulsed by the verbiage or the overbearing colors that they make a conscious decision to not click on it out of principle? This is a question that can’t be answered by looking at your dashboard and calculating ROI based on clicks over sales.

A new method of capturing qualitative metrics must prevail to bring back the glory days of display advertising. In place of firing off the same daily reports, we need to focus our time and energy on finding a way to improve abysmal click-through rates, be it through the creation of a qualitative algorithm based on quantitative metrics, a community dedicated to best practices or even a new web application. Have you or your agency put an emphasis on quality over quantity? If so, I’d like to hear about it!