Nearly 5% of desktop video ad clicks are accidental

Facebook recently announced its decision to crack down on accidental clicks; the social network won’t charge advertisers if the user goes back to the original page within two seconds of clicking the ad. Advertising Age and MediaPost covered the news in depth.

One of the telltale signs of an accidental click is that the click happened too fast. Using this definition, Pixalate dug into all clicks that came via programmatically-served ads in July 2017 to bring some hard numbers to the discussion.

Smartphones and tablets have the highest accidental click rates, and Connected TV/OTT also suffer from accidental clicks.

But what about desktopd devices?

Just under 5% of desktop video ad clicks are accidental

Key takeaways

• Desktop web video ads had an accidental click rate of 4.7%
• Desktop app video ads had an accidental click rate of 4.6% — nearly identical to the web video accidental click rate
• 2.9% of web display ad clicks were accidental
• A small amount — just 0.3% — of app display clicks were accidental
• As is the case on mobile devices and in the Connected TV/OTT space, video ads are significantly more likely to be accidentally clicked than display ads

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