Digital Advertising: What to Remember and Forget About the Click
- Clicks on display ads are a misleading metric, and one should only use clicks for direct response ad campaigns (or search).
- Clicks do not reveal information on brand building. Clicks don’t measure all of a campaign’s sales impact nor the cumulative (latent) impact of ads.
- Click-through rates continue to decrease as more content is created and more advertising inventory is available.
- The majority of clicks come from a small percentage of the total population. One of our company studies found that heavy and moderate clickers only represent a combined 8 percent of the U.S. Internet population, yet they account for about 85 percent of all click-throughs.
- Clicks are not the right metric to use for measuring online branding. Better metrics such as ‘reach and frequency’ help establish online media on the same playing field as traditional media to provide continuity in planning.
- Although it might be coined ‘the most measurable medium’, brands need to understand what metrics (and there are many!) are important in measuring their digital success.
