Is it Time to Ditch Click-Throughs?
Published January 26, 2012
The click is dead. All hail the marketing analytics report.
Many marketing and advertising professionals have railed against using click-through rates as a metric for determining the performance of a digital marketing campaign.
One of those people is Will Price, Flite's CEO, who writes in a column for Direct Marketing News that a better way to measure the impact of an ad is through consumers' behavior on a website - such as "hovers, scrolls and video plays." Did they watch the entire video? Did they retweet a blog post? Will they actually buy the product being advertised?
"We've relied on the click for far too long and it's about time we saw it for what it is: a clunky, vague metric that provides often meaningless data," Price writes. "The click is hardly the most accurate way to measure user engagement within a display advertisement, yet we're still relying on click-through rates (CTR) to inform our media buys."
Price predicts that marketers will start to shift to "app-like ads" this year, materials that serve a marketing purpose but also have some function for consumers.
He also notes that it will become more important for ad agencies and companies to quickly react to economic or other conditions - such as promoting a snowboard after a blizzard. Being agile allows for more creative design and rapid turnover, as well as continual monitoring and modifying after the campaign has been launched, Price says.
Yet not everyone is ready to ditch the long-standing metric. A study from GetResponse still used click-through rates as a means of judging customers' response, and found that just 18.3 percent of email marketers are adding a social sharing icon to their messages. The addition paid off: Emails with a social link had a 115 percent higher CTR than those without.