• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, November 13, 2024

As CTV advertising spend continues to increase and more people are watching video across different devices, will click-through rate (CTR) finally go the way of the dodo?

Ask any agency vet what they think is the most useless digital advertising metric and you will universally hear CTR.  Most veteran marketers will say the same thing when asked, but the metric keeps perpetuating.  Why do so many marketers still use CTR as a measure of their performance?

The simple answer is, it’s easy.  The more complicated answer is that CTR can be gamed.  The true answer is that non-marketers understand it far easier than they understand all the other metrics we use to measure performance up and down the customer journey and the performance funnel.

CTR is an easy metric to explain: The audience saw an ad and they clicked on it.  It is also an easy way to explain view-through: They saw an ad, they didn’t click on it, but they still went to the site later.

CTR and VTR are basic metrics that anyone can explain.  They are not truly indicative of digital ad performance anymore because of two reasons.  First off, the numbers for both are very poor.  Secondly, the nature of the web has changed dramatically, and click-through and view-through are simply fossilized in time.

As I noted at the beginning, more dollars are being spent on CTV these days, but CTV is not very clickable.  There are some platforms that allow you to click, but most don’t, and even more of the audience doesn’t know they can click when the opportunity is there.  Then you add social media into the mix and while much of that is clickable, most of the audience is too intent on scrolling, so they neglect to click at all.

One of the most interesting advancements in social is the “save for later” action.  It’s better than a click, and probably more indicative of a delayed desire to purchase.

The fact is, CTR persists because digital advertising is fragmented in so many ways -- in terms of channels, metrics, activation models and journeys.  There are many ways to reach the desired destination of a purchase or customer acquisition, and a good marketer has to account for them all.

CTR is unfortunately as close to a common denominator as the industry has provided, but maybe it’s time for that to change.  It is a short-term leading indicator for performance and you have access to it right away --  no waiting for a third party presentation or some other delayed form of feedback.   It doesn’t require a complicated study, like brand lift or favorability. 

That being said, what other metrics satisfy these needs and can be more easily understood by non-marketers, enabling marketers to both measure their performance as well as convey that performance to the rest of their organization?

Attention does feel like it could become that metric.  If you fail to capture their attention, none of the rest of the journey really matters.  Attention is captured across formats and channels, and it does feel like the lowest common denominator at the beginning of the journey.  Maybe attention can be the primary metric, finally replacing CTR completely?