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Why CTR doesn’t tell the whole story

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This week, industry body for digital advertising, The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) launched a provocative campaign with the strapline “Don’t be a #clickhead”.

This slightly cheeky pun provoked mixed reactions in our office (mostly dependent on your sense of humour!) but was designed to draw attention to a pretty serious campaign on the effective measurement of digital advertising.

So why take away the CTR?

The main villain in this tale? The click through rate (CTR)! The bullet proof metric we’ve all become beholden to, but one that doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story.

From our perspective, True Native (publisher hosted brand content) has the ability to be optimised towards additional or different KPIs dependent on the campaign’s goals. Whilst reach is always going to be important, and CTR isn’t going away any time soon, should we not be optimising towards time spent with content rather than the initial CTR?

For some of our campaigns this is a core metric – pure engagement with content. For others, it might be CTAs (calls to action on the brand site) from the article. If we agree what the goal of the campaign is in advance of creating content and flighting, we’re going to get better results as both content and tech work in tandem.

Measuring multi-channel effectiveness

We know that long form publisher hosted brand content leads to an 11pt lift in unaided awareness, 18pt lift in online ad recall and a 13pt lift in purchase intent* but how does this fit in with your wider campaign across different media channels? How do you prove the value of each media as a touchpoint? As part of the campaign, The IAB have produced a practical Toolkit covering four key tools that brands should consider using in their measurement approach:

  • Brand Studies
  • Econometrics /Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM)
  • Attribution
  • Controlled Experiments

The value of content

Measuring the success of long-form content beyond initial engagement can fit into any of the above, but it’s important to consider that where attribution is used, content tends to be top to middle funnel activity. We’ve seen some great results where multi-touch attribution (page 11 of the IAB Toolkit) is used and content can be seen as the starting point in the customer journey (discovery) despite the final ad event being another channel.

You can download the toolkit at www.iabuk.com/measurement

* comScore / Nativo study

 
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