The pressure to measure up

‘Click-through’ doesn’t mean anything today says Darren Hamer, managing director UK of Sticky. It doesn’t generate any revenue and without context there’s no way of knowing its impact on brand equity. So now it’s time for the truth – and visual performance studies will help achieve it.

Recently, there has been an increase in the number of reports which highlight the challenges associated with banner advertising. It’s making me question whether we are in danger of becoming irrelevant in our own business. And it’s not just a question of online banner ads; the ‘great white hope’ provided by the explosion of mobile comes with its own problems.

There is an ongoing debate about the effectiveness of online display advertising and the correct metrics by which to measure its effectiveness, but recent data clearly shows that the digital consumer is increasingly disengaged.

At a CIPR event in 2012, Richard Bagnall said that you are 112 times more likely to sign up for and complete Navy Seal training than you are to click on a banner ad. It’s a dramatic claim but it really highlights the challenges the sector faces. According to recent research by comScore for example, 8% of internet users account for 85% of all clicks on banner ads.

The report indicated that the number of people who click on display ads in a month had fallen from 32% of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8% of the internet user base) accounting for the vast majority (85%) of all clicks.

That means today we have over 90% of internet users that no longer engage with digital advertising at all. Heat map research shows that many users don’t even notice advertising. Click through rates are below 0.1% so how can this be an effective metric to measure performance?

comScore said the results underscore the notion that, for most display ad campaigns, the click-through is not the most appropriate metric for evaluating campaign performance. In mobile the problems are similar. Research from Goldspot Media identified that 50% of mobile click-throughs are a ‘fat fingers’ problem.

To be fair, comScore’s figure of 8% specifically refers to display advertising, so it ignores highly targeted contextual, search and other high engagement and high relevancy ads, which are market sectors showing growth.

It also ignores the massive proliferation of sites and services over the last five years – US users were served over 5 trillion display ads last year. But surely we need some kind of metric that works across the board for advertising in different digital media so that we have something that brands and agencies can engage with effectively?

The problem is that today a click-through doesn’t really mean anything – it doesn’t generate any revenue and without context there’s no way of knowing its impact on brand equity. Brands need to measure how far an advert helps to achieve a specific business goal. It doesn’t matter whether that goal is to increase sales or footfall, awareness, reputation etc; all that matters is whether or not that advert is helping you to reach that target. Given how much pressure the digital advertising industry is under to measure up, using metrics which seem to be increasingly irrelevant creates a very real danger of damaging industry growth.

It’s clearly time to take another look at how we should be measuring performance. And, given the hyper-mobile state of today’s consumer and the increasing noise that they face, it’s surely time to start creating new actionable insights to aid the ‘in the moment’ world we now live in?

There is no question that benchmarking data on a large scale gives advertisers more relevant insight and opportunity than traditional metrics can offer. That means we need smart data that aids brand advertising as well as the obvious DR activity.

Visual performance studies executed by Sticky have shown that up to 30% of all online ad impressions are never looked at, let alone clicked on. Also, the current rise of the viewable impression metric only tells the advertiser that their ad has been placed in a position that has the potential to be seen but is not guaranteed to be seen.

It’s time for the truth – who has seen the ad, for how long did they view it and how long did it take for them to notice it – which then leads to a true Cost Per View metric that is relevant and actionable.

Whether or not an advert has been seen could be an effective new metric for digital advertising. It may not be the only approach – the question of who leads the brave new World of digital performance metrics is open to a huge and potentially nasty debate, but the rewards for the brand that makes these demands for further clarity are going to be both impressive and rewarding.

Sticky was formally known as The Eye Track Shop.