Lumen & British Gas
Lumen conducted an analysis of 43 million British Gas digital display ad impressions from Q4 2017 and Q1 2018, finding that ads on newsbrand sites are not only consistently more likely to be seen in the first place, but also drive far higher levels of clicks and conversions than other sites.
Results show that ads on newsbrands sites are noticed more quickly and looked at for longer, with 10 seconds of viewable time on a newsbrand site gaining the equivalent level of views to 30 seconds of viewable time on other sites. Lumen also found that dwell times increase more quickly at higher levels of viewable time on newsbrand sites.
For brands such as British Gas, online sales are a vital measure. Newsbrand sites delivered a 51% increase in conversions compared with non-newsbrand sites.
Newsbrands contributed a small proportion of impressions to British Gas campaigns over the course of the measurement period. This would appear to reflect the problematic nature of programmatic buying, in that it doesn’t include factors that account for the quality of an environment, reducing trading to the lowest common denominator. New research from Newsworks & GroupM, ‘The value of quality’, proves the cost effectiveness of appearing in newsbrand environments.
Ads on newsbrand sites:
- Are 30% more likely to be actually seen
- Achieve a +261% click rate
- Deliver a +51% conversion rate
This is compared to non-newsbrand sites.
Watch Lumen’s managing director Mike Follett and British Gas’ digital marketing manager Patrick Smith at Newsworks’ 2018 Effectiveness Summit: