Another great article on the shortcomings of the click as a metric this morning, this one from Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer of comScore. In addition to the points Josh makes in his article, I would also recall a recent post of my own where I show that CTR has been almost completely uncorrelated with ROI in our offline sales lift studies. Since that post I heard a talk by Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank where he presented a much broader dataset (graphic below) that showed similar lack of correlation between CTR and the metric that really matters: did your online campaign ultimately sell more product in stores.
RIP the click.
[...] similarity in Look-Alike Patterns is a reliable predictor of purchase behavior. Ironically, Nielsen’s own data (as well as work by others) clearly demonstrates that at least clickstream data is not a predictor [...]
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