The Click: Brand Marketing's Most Misleading Measure

 Many brand marketers still rely on the click as a success metric for their campaigns. Collective found that optimizing for clicks on any given campaign can be detrimental to branding success metrics such as brand lift. 

By studying the ad interactions of over 100 million anonymous user profiles and over 1 billion ad impressions served in the first few months of 2011, Collective uncovered a host of interesting statistics on "clickers" and the prevalence of "click fraud," debunking the commonly held belief that a high click through rate is beneficial to brand advertising. 

Study highlights:

• 99% of stable cookies each month never click on an ad
• Many clicks appear to be accidental
• Clickers are mostly low income, older, and female
• Collective found no correlation between CTR and brand lift

For more findings and to download a copy of Collective's click study, click here.