Digital Effectiveness

Discover why digital advertising is effective for reaching your customers and building brands.

This page is home to key stats on usage, and research packed with all the insight you need to prove digital advertising offers reach, results, and return. You will also find tips and tools to help you use it most effectively, as well as all of our research on digital effectiveness in a selection of downloadable, bite-sized charts that you can pop into your own presentations.

Digital is everywhere

2 hrs

per day on average was spent on social media in 2022

3hrs 32mins

spent online per day per adult in 2022

18.9 million

people tuned into on-demand music services every week in 2022

Digital works hard for your brand

Speaker at IAB event

Digital builds brands

A summary from wider research of digital display campaigns delivering up to five times better awareness, favourability, and purchase intent.

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Digital is cost effective

A snapshot from a wider Kantar study that indicates digital display can make your budget go further on awareness, associations, and motivation.

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Audience at IAB event

Digital offers scale to ensure you reach your audience

Key stats that demonstrate we are spending more time online than ever before, providing more opportunities to see your brand.

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Digital is effective

IAB UK research in collaboration with Kantar Millward Brown, OnDevice Research and Research and Analysis of Media (RAM), collated results from 675 individual campaigns from 2008 through 2017 to see whether digital display advertising is effective.

Analysis of these campaigns demonstrated that digital advertising is effective across key marketing metrics, including awareness, brand perception, education, and sales intent. 

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Downloadable Charts

We’ve compiled key killer stats on digital effectiveness in a selection of handy, one-slide decks you can pop into your own presentations.

Go to downloads

The role of digital across the advertising funnel

IAB UK and On Device Research have analysed 516 ad campaigns globally to understand how advertisers can maximise digital’s effectiveness across the advertising funnel. 

In line with our findings, we developed 10 best practice principles to help advertisers maximise digital’s effectiveness across the funnel.

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How to improve your digital advertising

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5 rules of effectiveness

We teamed up with Kantar to analyse and test factors that create an effective digital display campaign, identifying key rules for getting it right.

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5 ways to maximise ad attention online

Along with with eye-tracking specialists Lumen and IPSOS MORI, we identified ways in which brands can boost the attention of their digital ads.

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5 rules to ensure the quality of your digital advertising

Working with Display & Data Steering Group and Sparkler, we set to understand what factors consumers consider key to a high-quality digital ad.

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Downloadable Charts

We’ve compiled key killer stats on digital effectiveness in a selection of handy, one-slide decks you can pop into your own presentations.

Go to downloads

More on effectiveness

IAB members in discussion at a parliamentary event

SME Tool

Created for small UK businesses to help unlock the value of digital advertising to drive more sales, raise awareness, and help you succeed.

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Case Studies

We’ve pulled together examples of effective digital campaigns from across the industry to help you supercharge your digital advertising.

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Adspend Analyser

Put the power of our Digital Adspend study in your hands with the flexibility to build handy charts using over 20 years of data.

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Rediscover the joy of digital advertising

Champion connections instead of clicks. Capture audiences' imaginations, not just their attention. Boldly move to your own beat instead of letting tech set the pace. It’s time to rediscover the joy of digital.