• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, March 12, 2008

When are we going to abandon click-through as the primary online metric for success?

Before you rush to a judgment and respond to my article to tell me how "wrong" I am for bringing this up or for how bitter I sound when I pose the question, hear me out.

I speak with a number of salespeople on a very regular basis and I hear the horror stories of agencies, clients and marketers who profess to be running a "branding" campaign and all they ask about is click-through rates! I hear all about "direct response" marketers who are buying low CPM inventory in the hopes of driving customer acquisition -- and the first thing they ask about is click-through rates rather than conversions and/or landing page optimizations. I know that people are more educated about the marketplace, clients are more understanding, and yada yada... but regardless of what everyone says, they still routinely default to asking about click rates! This means we haven't gotten past the click rate yet, so my question is still valuable and warranted.

The truth is that we won't get past the click rate until we actually propose and adopt a standard set of metrics that can be latched onto and will take the place of our apparent love and passion for click rates! Of course, it is hard to propose a standard set of metrics, because each marketer will tell you that their campaign is different and that it requires a unique set of metrics and tags and measures to determine success. I, however, maintain that we can definitely adopt a standard set of metrics and implement industrywide understanding of these metrics as a measure of individual campaign success.

To do so, we need to understand first off the difference between a supposed "branding" effort and a "direct response" or "customer acquisition" effort. The basic difference is a matter of timing, or sessions.

Fundamentally all advertising exists to do one thing: increase sales and/or market share. If the goal is to generate an immediate response, meaning the acquisition of information or a customer in a single session generated via a click, then we can consider that to be a direct response effort. If the goal is to drive an increase in sales, market share or customers over a longer period of time (basically anything beyond that initial single session) we should likely consider that to be a branding campaign, or what is most typically now referred to as a brand response effort.

The two campaigns should look at the same things: total spend, impressions (which is still a measure of reach and frequency if you know how to calculate these), immediate clicks or deferred clicks/visits (many times called view- through clicks), conversion from a site visitor to a customer (conversion rate) and length of time between initial visits to customer acquisition (referred to as a lag-conversion period). These are the basic metrics. Click rate is almost always examined here, but it is not an appropriate metric. In the offline world, how many times have you seen someone hop into a taxi cab as a result of seeing an ad on the cab, and ask to be driven to the store featured in that ad? This is the functional equivalent of tracking click-through rates -- and if you look at it in those terms, it sounds a little silly.

For more advanced marketers and the ones who have a deeper relationship between the people implementing their campaigns and the people measuring their business, you can track a correlative effect between the three primary metrics for success; budget spend, site traffic and customer acquisition. If you have enough data (preferably 12 months for basic analysis, hopefully more for cross-platform analysis) you should begin to see correlations between increased spend against different types of media and the results in traffic visits and customer acquisition.

Most savvy marketers can attribute the majority of their traffic to specific media, even attributed to television and print ads if you have enough information on the past performance of these vehicles for driving interest and traffic to the site, and you can begin to see how spending against one vehicle can increase the effect of another (the most common example here is the proof seen in many cases where an increased TV spend typically results in an increased search query related to a brand/topic and an increase in overall search spend during that period of time). These correlations are the holy grail of marketing and are what an advanced marketer should be looking at.

You should take note that I do not mention click-through rates as a primary metric for success here either. Click rates are a crutch that many media people use because they did not provide ample data from the beginning of the campaign. If you are going to spend the money, you should tag the appropriate pages and you should certainly expect to look at the appropriate data; otherwise, your marketing is a waste of time.

So please, please, please... stop asking about click rates as the first line of measuring success! If we can begin to standardize these other metrics, our industry will become even more important and more valuable over time. Both of which, I'm sure you will agree, are positive outcomes!