Online advertising emerged strong in 2010: O.P.U.S. Report

According to Ozone Media Performance Users Study (O.P.U.S), online performance advertising jumped by 70%, post the slump, March, April, May 2010 being the recovery months. Real Estate, Travel and Finance saw a huge increase in consumer demand and interest in the year 2010.

Online performance advertisers received a whopping jump of 238% increase in responses to finance ads from Jul'09 to Jun'10, while in real estate category online advertisers saw a 7 fold increase in response from Jul'09 vs. Jun'10. Year on Year online travel advertisers received a substantial jump of 212% increase in response from Jul'09 vs. Jun'10.

"2010 was a turning point for online advertising. Digital advertising saw a sharp influx in the number of advertisers accompanied by healthy growth in digital media budgets. While Performance Advertising primarily benefited in the early part of the year; with increasing confidence in the medium, advertisers have started considering digital media more seriously for display purposes too." said Kiran Gopinath, CEO, Ozone Media.

The O.P.U.S report indicates that online ads continued to receive highest interest from internet users in metros. Though non-metro locations have started making their presence felt, leads from metros were nearly 4 times the leads generated from non-metros. NRIs form just two percent of the total leads generated.

"Performance advertising sustained advertiser interest, during the slump, it also drove the growth in the last few quarters. We believe advertisers have started realizing the potential of exploiting the long tail of online Indians, which Ozone Media is best poised to deliver" said Yuzdi Badhniwalla, VP- Sales, Marketing and Alliances, Ozone Media.

The NRI category showed greater interest in Matrimony and Finance sectors. Non Metro category has shown highest interest in Matrimony sector. The education category received a 20% increase in response from Jul'09 to Jun'10. Education leads have a five month steady period of sustained interest starting Dec'09 and lasting to Apr'10, peaking in Feb'10. Travel category bounced back and received a huge response at the beginning of 2010 post the slump in 2009. The rise in the real estate category advertising is nothing short of spectacular. A clear revival in property advertising is visible post the slump in metros as well as non-metros.

The O.P.U.S. report is an analysis of nearly a quarter of a million leads generated from campaigns that were run on the Ozone Media network from July 2009 to June 2010. The data is further classified into 5 performance advertising sectors and studied for variations across audience categories.

The 5 performance advertising sectors studied are Finance, Matrimony, Travel, Education and Real Estate. The responses received were further classified into audience categories of Metros, Non-Metros and NRIs.

The study provides trends and analysis over a 12 month period and is indicative of the trend for online performance advertising in the country.

For every vertical the Total leads in July 2009 have been indexed to 100 and leads for each month thereafter have been compared to July 2009.

Ozone Media has rich publisher base across content verticals, giving advertisers from sectors like education, travel, matrimony, real estate and finance a wide reach to their target audience. Advertisers leverage this wide reach to derive direct response to their product/service offerings. Ozone Media has utilized this to glean a macro view of the trends emerging from the online user behavior. The O.P.U.S. report is aimed at providing an insight into the user behavior across advertising sectors. With state-of-the-art ad serving and optimization technology, Ozone Media strives to maximize Return on Investment for performance advertising campaigns for advertisers and revenues for publishers.