WebProNews

Last week, Compete shared some interesting data looking at homepage visitors at the top publisher sites, and compared them to visitors to the entire domain.

"Homepages present big opportunities for online advertising. For example, display advertising on Facebook consists mainly of small sponsored ads that blend with the rest of the content on profile and other pages within the site," says Jessica Ong on the Compete Blog. "It will be interesting to see if Facebook further monetizes its homepage."

Compete has now looked at AOL's homepage as it pertains to ad inventory. Specifically, they looked at an ad for Tracfone. "This type of homepage ad is a go-to tactic for media buyers looking to drive lots of traffic, and hopefully sales, to their advertising clients," says Compete's Alex Patriquin.

"However, it can often be difficult to tell just how effectively homepage ads perform. Clickthrough, the most common measure of ad effectiveness, doesn’t represent the full value of display advertising since many people who see the ad don’t click on it, but do visit the advertiser’s site afterwards," adds Patriquin. "There’s also the question of whether those people who visit an advertiser’s site would have gone anyway, regardless of whether or not they saw the ad."

It turned out that according to Compete's analysis, visitors from the AOL homepage were 3.77 times more likely to visit Tracfone the same day. They were 6.28 more likely to visit in the same session.

Here's what the referring sites looked like for Tracfone:

That's a powerful homepage. Compete's data was collected using a new "advertising effectiveness solution" it has developed for homepage ads on portals and other top publishers.