The debate about which media metric efficiently measures the
effectiveness of a web-based advertisement, such as banners, is still
alive and well. Nonetheless, the most widely used measure of
effectiveness for banner advertisements is still the click-through
rate. The purpose of this article is to review the measures currently
used to measure effectiveness in web advertising and to empirically
determine the factors that might contribute to observed variations in
click-through rates based on an actual sample of advertising campaigns.
The study examined the complete set of all advertising insertions of 77
customers of a large advertising agency over a one-year period. A
resulting sample of 1,258 placements was used to study the effect of
banner formats and exposure levels on click-through rates using
analysis of variance. Results suggest that the strongest effect on
click-through rates comes from the use of trick banners
(η2 = 0.25) and that other factors such as size of the
advertisement, motion, use of “click here,” and “online
only” type of announcers all have a significant impact of
click-through rates. Implications of these findings as well as limitations
of the current study are discussed and directions for future research
agendas proposed.