by Andy Atherton
October 9th, 2009
An article in today’s eMarketer nicely summarizes some recent comScore / Starcom USA research showing that fewer and fewer users are clicking on ads and those clicks are concentrated in an ever smaller share of the user base. Not good news for fans of CTR as an “optimization” metric – and there are still too many of these.
The article includes a priceless quote from John Lowell, Starcom USA SVP and director, research and analytics, “A click means nothing, earns no revenue and creates no brand equity. Your online advertising has some goal—and it’s certainly not to generate clicks.” Don’t mince words John. Tell us what you really think. We’ve seen the same with our own offline sales measurements, by the way. CTR is not even remotely correlated with offline sales lift or associated campaign ROI. Here’s an example of the lack of correlation from some recent campaigns:
Reading Lowell’s quote and considering the fact that this is still even a topic for discussion reminded me of Monty Python’s famous Parrot Sketch.
Advertiser: “I know a dead metric when I see one and I am looking at one right now.”
DR Network: “No, no it’s not dead. It’s just resting.”
by Andy Atherton
August 26th, 2009
Last week MediaPost picked up a press release on some comScore research showing that online ads can be effective in driving offline sales. Just as effective as TV in fact. This came as no surprise to us at Brand.net. We have seen similar results in our work with clients measuring offline sales impact in response to online campaigns.
This recent release apparently builds on some earlier research discussed by comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni in his keynote to the OMMA metrics conference in San Francisco at the end of July (covered in another MediaPost article, from which I borrowed my headline). In his remarks, Fulgoni gave some rough treatment to CTR (similar to a post last week from Cory Treffiletti). I was on panel at the same OMMA conference. The panel focused on Brand measurement and the moderator (Dan Beltramo from Vizu) asked each of the panelists to answer a few questions to get the conversation started. One of the questions was, “What is the most misused metric for Brand Campaigns?”. All 4 panelists including yours truly answered, “CTR.”, to which Dan readily agreed. The fact is CTR isn’t correlated with attitudinal measures that Vizu focuses on. Nor is it correlated with ROI as measured by offline sales impact vs. online campaign spend.
The moral of the story is that well-executed online advertising delivers results throughout the marketing funnel and those results come through in the metrics, when the metrics applied are meaningful.
