Imagine yourself as a yield manager for a retargeting vendor that was getting credit for post-impression revenue. Your greatest margin would come from a strategy that allowed you to deliver low-cost inventory to all abandoners (cookie users having been served an ad), and then claim responsibility for a large number of return visitors/conversions that would have happened even without the campaign. Most early retargeting companies are only successful because advertisers are still willing to give credit where it's not due.
Clicks
Knowing that impression volume and post-impression attribution give little insight into banner ad success, clicks and CTR have become a crutch for those hoping to understand campaign performance. Historically, marketers haven't had anything else to reference.
If asked if they ever click on banner ads, almost everyone will say "no." In fact, according to comScore/Starcom research, just 16 percent of internet users would answer "yes," and half of those (only 8 percent of all users) generate 85 percent of all clicks. Very few people click on ads, and those that do, do so often. So, campaigns optimized for CTR only succeed by narrowing the targetable audience and serving ads to users that have a higher propensity to click. This is highly effective at increasing CTR, but will return deceptively impressive results for those marketing managers who think clicks are the ultimate indicators of campaign performance. The question that marketing managers must ask themselves is, "Is my now narrowed audience of likely clickers the group I'd really like to reach, and does this strategy yield the best possible outcome?"
The answer is no.
Because typical users don't click on banner ads, advertisers forfeit a large pool of opportunity by optimizing for CTR. For ecommerce advertisers, sacrificing profitable incremental revenue for marginal improvement of CTR is unnecessary. Not all buyers are clickers and not all clickers are buyers -- in fact, most of them are not.
In mid-2011, Collective Media released findings from their study of more than 100 million users and more than 1 billion impressions, which found:
- 99 percent of users never clicked ads
- Users that did click were 210 percent more likely to click again
- 18 percent of clicks came from ad impressions that had already been clicked
- Clickers tend to be older, lower-income users who are less likely to spend money online
- Users who are economizing click 65 percent more often than those that purchase frequently online
In ecommerce, and certainly in the case of retargeting, clicks have become a standard measurement of direct user responsiveness to an ad. While it's true that clicks represent an immediate movement from the ad to the website, they do not demonstrate consumer purchase intent. Furthermore, by optimizing display media exclusively for improved CTR, advertisers forfeit profitable incremental revenue and brand lift.
Conclusion
The organizations behind 3MS (IAB, ANA, and 4AS) are making a clear call for higher quality performance metrics. What's surprising is that engagement has, so far, been overlooked. As advertisers consider new standards for understanding display ad influence, it's important that they recognize ad engagement, and subsequent post-engagement conversions, as a viable metric that will help improve optimization and attribution techniques.
Tony Zito is CEO of mediaFORGE Inc.
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