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Despite clicks having been proven to have no correlation to real success, more media is being bought today based on the cheapness of the click than any other KPI.

At a recent ACA Webinar, Ian Hewetson, VP Client Services at Eyereturn Marketing, shared the effect of the industry’s long-standing addiction to clicks and what marketers can do to help break the habit.

It is a widespread problem. More than 75% of campaigns running through Eyereturn systems (adserver or demand-side platform) are client-directed to deliver the highest click-through rate (CTR) or the lowest cost-per-click (CPC). Hewetson can understand why marketers would make the request, but he thinks that they’re missing out on the bigger picture.
“When it comes to media planning, [the click] can become the easy button,” Hewetson said. “Clicks are very easy to understand. It’s a single metric and within big media brands clicks have often become the benchmark KPI over the years. Because everyone is always looking for improvement on their benchmarks, it becomes all-too-easy to justify any tactic based on the click.”

The Trouble With Clicks

Hewetson says there’s nothing wrong with measuring clicks, per se. The trouble starts when the click is used as the primary KPI for a campaign, for the following six reasons:

• Often the CTR is not from wholly unique clicks. The same users tend to click on ads again and again, Hewetson said. And of course, not all of these serial clickers are even human.
  
  Optimizing a digital campaign toward another KPI can reduce the number of serial clickers significantly, Hewetson advised.
• Click fraud remains a big issue, despite safety measures such as whitelists and verification vendors. That’s because clicks remain an easy KPI to game, as any fraudster can set up a website to attract fraudulent clicks.
  “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Hewetson said. “Because if you have advertisers that optimize toward a click, they will seek out the inventory that actually drives those high click-rates.”



• A lot of the clicks on ads are likely unintentional. A lot of them come from “click-bait” sites, where ads are peppered around or over content, or that use slideshows with arrows that purport to lead to the next slide but actually lead to an ad.

  “The web has adapted to feed clicks to advertisers, whether those clicks are real or not,” Hewetson said.

• Clicks don’t necessarily equal brand site engagement. 60.66% of ad clicks that make it to a landing page don’t make it any further than that landing page, Hewetson said. In addition, users that land on a brand page from an ad have a lower average number of page views than users arriving by other means.
• Optimizing to clicks skews inventory sources. Optimizing a campaign to clicks actually optimizes to sites that generate high click rates, which tend to be lower-quality sites, Hewetson said. As an example, he showed a campaign optimized to clicks had received only 8% of its clicks from so-called Tier 1 sites.
• Optimizing to clicks equals optimizing to mobile, unless the marketer specifies otherwise. Mobile devices create a much higher CTR than desktop and it’s not just because people are more engaged on their phones, Hewetson said.

  “People have large fingers in relation to the size of the tiny phone screen” he said. “That’s why when you break down CTR by device screen size, you see a much higher CTR for smaller screens.”

  Optimizing to clicks also puts your campaign in a lot of apps as well. And app inventory, contrary to popular belief, is not fraud free. It’s also difficult to track results in apps.

In summary:

• Most clicks are generated by a small number of users
• Fraud actively targets click-optimized campaigns
• Clicks do not = conversions
• A lot of clicks are unintentional
• Inventory can be designed to trick users into clicking
• Clickers visit fewer pages on brand sites
• Mobile devices deliver high CTR but low conversions
• More mobile = more discrepancies between clicks and site visits

Looking for strategies to move away from using CTR and CPC as a key metric? ACA members can view Ian Hewetson’s suggestions, as well as the entire presentation and slide deck by visiting the ACA Webinars archive.