Today, advanced advertising technology provides advertisers with the ability to measure and optimize their digital marketing campaigns against business-oriented goals that matter for the bottom line. And yet, many advertisers today still measure digital marketing performance solely with click-based metrics. This is problematic for several reasons.
First, a very small percentage of the Internet population (~8%) makes up a large percentage of advertising clicks (~85%). By measuring clicks that are predominantly generated by the same group of Internet users, advertisers are likely not engaging with their core audience.
Similarly, Internet users who click ads don’t necessarily resemble the desired audience of purchasing customers, in terms of their online behavior. A 2014 MediaMath analysis revealed that for a population of product purchasers, only 3% had ever clicked on a banner from ANY campaign, not just the campaign from which they bought the product.
Thirdly, a study found that blank ads managed to drive similar click-through-rates compared to true ads, due to accidental or “curious” clicks.
Finally, and perhaps most troublesome, is the fact that click fraud remains a major problem. Perpetrators of fraud are continuously gaming the system to make bot clicks undistinguishable from human clicks. As are result, click-based metrics are susceptible to fraud and increasingly unreliable.
Successful anti-fraud measures involve leveraging effective fraud blocking software and measuring success along metrics that are harder for bots to fake, which also results in lower CTRs and higher CPCs – more in line with actual human behavior.
The industry’s historical reliance on clicks was in large part due to a lack of alternatives. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. Direct Response marketers have the benefit of being able to optimize to online and/or offline purchases, which are much more difficult actions for bots to fake. Brand marketers, however, can also choose from an array of metrics that measure brand engagement, but are far preferable to clicks, because they are less easily faked. The list below provides examples of other engagement metrics that provide more robust measures of brand engagement. Note that many of these metrics can be applied to any digital channel, such as desktop display, mobile, video, and social.
