“Clickthrough is the worst metric ever,” and other online musings
September 21st, 2008 by Hugh Kennedy
This past week MITX, the Massachusetts Innovation Technology Exchange, held one of its well-attended and well-executed breakfast seminars (note to event planner: two black plastic catering trays of carb-bomb ‘pastries’ does not constitute breakfast: in many lands, people are known to eat fresh fruit). Panelists included the full range of online stakeholders: a media planner, a media technology inventor, an agency customer experience expert, an analyst, and a marketing manager from an online company.
Some of the musings, observations and insights that I found interesting:
* Creative, online and media teams at agencies still aren’t much better than marketing teams at companies in coordinating their efforts to make the best use of the online environment, much less measure the effect of using it.
* Isolating ‘online branding’ is itself something of an anachronism. Agencies should try to measure anywhere and anywhere a brand is touching a consumer, whether that’s a blog pulse, search lift, PR’s influence on search and vice versa, or what one panelist called “true CPA [cost per action],” the combined effect of all channels working with each other.
* Most companies remain too bureaucratic for the B to A world of Web 2.0 (or as one of the panelists fashionably shortened it, “Web 2″), B being the customer speaking to A the company versus the traditional model of A the company shilling to B the customer. In addition, most corporate marketing departments are last to be incorporated into a measurement program though they’re usually most responsible for brand performance.
* Branding in all channels really needs to evolve from a series of activities to a mode of behavior that reflects well on your company. Or as our analyst chair reminded us, there’s typically a huge gulf between the promise of Brand Image and the delivery of Brand Action. Again, most of that inaction is a function of no one within the corporation being chartered to act on behalf of the rest.
As for advice?
* Stick to your marketing objective and don’t get swayed by bogus measurements like banner ad clickthrough. Sean Corcoran from Carat reported that in one recent campaign, fully half of the clicks they received were mistakes and never even landed on the target page. He half-jokingly suggested that banners shouldn’t be clickable at all anymore. People don’t click on banners generally; however that doesn’t mean they’re not effective in a cross-media campaign of behavior-inducing activities.
* Measure holistically across multiple channels. Integrated marketing demands integrated measurement (palm slap to forehead). One of the panelists, using an ad server, typically shows 24-hour, 7-day and 30-day windows of post-view cookie activity after a banner has run to show that even though clickthrough may be low to nil, people are in fact going to search engines and the client’s Web site after being exposed to banners. Also be on the lookout for metrics systems that are easily gamed so agencies or service providers can inflate the top line and make you look a lot better than you really do.
* Continue to build the tempo and variety of your campaigns rather than focusing on conversations about clickthrough. Be in multiple channels where your audience is looking so they can experience the brand in many different ways. Engagement is what you want to measure, and clicking rarely tells you much about engagement.
* Finally, what are you delivering that might actually encourage more engaged behavior from your audiences? Does the content have any true value? Is it exclusive content you can’t get anywhere else?
This value comment led to an interesting final piece of advice from the Modernista! panelist to a media rep from a national newsmagazine: “Why don’t you guys just provide freelance writers to create content for blogs?”
Again, meant mostly in jest (think of the ethics dilemmas), but you get the idea.
