CTR Is Not the Whole Story

Many advertisers focus on Click Through Rate (CTR) as their primary KPI for digital display campaigns. This can tell a really incomplete story when it comes to evaluating campaign effectiveness. We’ll be examining how other metrics like conversion rate and cost per conversion can be more important, how impression level response is a vital piece of the puzzle and how CTR can be misleading in cases where ad placements are not adequately optimized.

Click through is an attractive metric – it corresponds with the ad driven traffic that shows in Google Analytics (GA) but it really only tells part of the story. When comparing impression driven traffic and conversions, which are not visible in GA, often you will find there are an additional one or two responses to the ad for every click response. Many advertisers are excessively focused on results in GA which will give you a skewed view of ad response – especially for display advertising.

Click through can also be exaggerated by placements that manipulate unintentional clicks from users – especially on mobile. I’ve seen placement performance reports showing CTR’s of 2% and higher – clearly not valid clicks given that the average display CTR is around 0.1%.  Accidental clicks like these don’t lead to conversions and sales even though they make the campaign’s performance look better from a CTR point of view.The most important thing to look at are total responses – both from clicks and impressions. These “view through” conversions and site visits are often more than half of the total campaign response. An additional critical metric is lift – how do overall sales compare during this campaign as opposed to prior campaigns? Running a test in a smaller geo and then measuring lift is one way to evaluate this metric.

In the end, it’s sales, leads and other responses that matter far more than clicks. These are the things we should be paying the most attention to as we evaluate our campaign performance.