The Click: Brand marketing's most misleading measure.

JEREMY STANLEY, VP Analytics, Collective
JUSTIN EVANS, SVP Audience Development, Collective

Over the years there have been a number of studies that have examined the fallacy of using CTR as a measure of campaign success, and the nature of the clicker’s themselves. One of the best known, comScore’s Natural Born Clicker’s study, revealed that a small minority of web users make up the majority of click activity online.

Yet, many marketers continue to rely on the click as their primary measure of campaign effectiveness, including campaigns with branding objectives.

In new analysis by Collective’s insights team, we examined the advertising interactions of over 100 million anonymous user profiles and over one billion advertising impressions served in the first months of 2011. In addition, we reviewed the action lift of 100 campaigns, and brand lift reported in 400 campaigns.

Key findings:

99% of cookies examined never click.

More than expected, a tiny fraction of people ever click on an ad. In fact, 99% of stable cookies examined never click on an ad. This is a more pronounced disparity than was reported in comScore’s study. Further, users who have clicked in the past are twice as likely to click again in the future.

Many clicks are accidental.

Nearly 20% of ads that received any click activity received multiple clicks within the same impression, suggesting that these clicks were unintentional. This effect is especially seen among online gamers, who clicked 43% more often than non-gamers, and on mobile devices where users clicked 123% more often.

Intentional clickers are lower income.

An examination of who tended to click paints a picture of an audience that may not be attractive to most advertisers. Clickers tend to be lower income, older and late technical neophytes.

• Users with incomes under $40k click 30% more often than users with incomes over $200k.
• Users with only 'fair' credit scores click 20% more often than users with 'excellent' credit scores.
• Users who are late adopters of new technologies click 50% more often than early adopters.
• Users who are economizing click 65% more often than users who purchase frequently online.

Further, the highest performing CTR campaigns examined (top 20%) have a 150% higher CTR but an 8% lower post impression action rate. Similarly, a preliminary study of 100 campaigns showed no correlation between CTR and brand lift and purchase intent as measured by VIZU post-impression surveys.

Hence, optimization of campaigns to achieve higher CTR may in fact be reducing brand ROI.

Conclusion

This examination of audience data and campaign metrics illustrates, once again, that the click is an unreliable measure of campaign performance.

This study should serve to caution marketers, that relying on CTR means being comfortable targeting low income, older, technologically less sophisticated consumers and recognize that most of the click ‘leads’ will go nowhere, as they were generated by unintentional clicks or will not result in a post impression action nor brand.