By Jim Meskauskas , June 27, 2000
Friends! Reps! Online media planners! Lend me your ears! We have come here to bury the click, not to praise it!
That's right, faithful readers, you can say that you read it here first. And after you read the first formal eulogy written for the click-through rate, go forth as your agency's town crier and shout the news from every rooftop, from every conference room, and at every client-input session.
'Tis true, click-through is dead.
Well, it is as a metric for determining an online campaign's success anyway, if that campaign is interested in anything other than traffic.
From time to time in this space I've discussed the varying metrics that can be applied for determining the success of varying aspects of an online ad campaign. They have been:
The further down the list you go, the weaker CTR's role becomes. But none of the metrics listed here alone toll the death knell for the CTR. Instead, it is a new metric in town, one that is making the rounds at conferences, in industry conversation, and even a bit in the trades.
Unlike the metrics listed above, it is a correlative rather than causal metric, which makes it even more surprising. Rather than showing a cause-and-effect relationship, it demonstrates something reciprocally related without a direct A-to-B connection.
What I'm talking about is the relationship between those that have been exposed to an ad message, didn't click on the ad unit, but went to the advertiser's site and transacted anyway.
AdKnowledge's "Online Advertising Report: First Quarter 2000" indicates that 34% of site transactions involved individuals who arrived at the site in just this way. That's an extraordinary figure. And it suggests that though click-through rates are down, it doesn't really matter because users are making it to advertisers' sites regardless of direct response to the advertising.
I currently have only a few clients gathering this data, and we are still working on the various ways to use it. But what it means is that perhaps sites on which you or your client have run advertising may be performing on a correlative level that is not reflected on a causal one. Sites that are "stickier" than others tend to have lower CTRs but have higher levels of audience involvement. It is possible you will find that, though a sticky content site has a less-than-desirable click-through rate, it's actually sending more transactional visitors to the advertiser's site than those sites that have higher CTRs.
But how do you get at this data?
Well, as this kind of read is just becoming available, I know of only a few.
So spend some time with your clicks. Visit, talk about old times, and even bring flowers because the click-through days are numbered.