DM News: DoubleClick: Online Direct Response Rates Down in Q4

Response rates to online ads fell dramatically in the last quarter of 2003, according to DoubleClick statistics. The firm served more than 200 billion ads in Q4, up 43 percent over the prior year. That additional clutter may partly explain why the response rates fell 45 percent, to a rate of four responses out of every 1,000 ads. It may also involve an increasing proportion of branding ads that do not deliberately elicit a user response.

View-through responses - responses that happen sometime after a user sees an ad - increased 42 percent. That increase may also be partly explained by the gargantuan amount of gross impressions carpet bombing the web. Users receiving many copies of the same ad will count for many view-through responses if they wind up later in the month visiting the relevant web page.