The online advertising sector witnessed a turnaround in 2010, as increasing confidence in the medium, has made advertisers take digital media more seriously for display purposes, according to a study.

Aimed at providing an insight into the user behaviour across advertising sectors, the Ozone Media Performance Users Study (OPUS) 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.

It said online performance advertising jumped by 70 per cent, post the slump in 2009-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.

"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," Ozone Media CEO Kiran Gopinath said.

The data is classified into five performance advertising sectors and studied for variations across audience categories.

The performance of 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.

Online performance advertisers received a whopping jump of 238 per cent increase in responses to finance advertisements from July 2009 to June 2010, while in real estate category online advertisers saw a seven-fold increase in response under the period under review. Online travel advertisers received a substantial jump of 212 per cent year-on-year.

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

The report indicates that online advertisements 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 four times the leads generated from non-metros. NRIs form just 2 per cent of the total leads generated.

Education leads have a five month steady period of sustained interest starting December 2009 and lasting to April 2010, peaking in February 2010.

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.