The Click-through rate has always been considered an important metric in online advertising. It essentially tells you how many visitors came to your site from a particular online marketing effort (e.g email newsletter).
It used to be that it was a highly regarded metric and deemed one of, if not the most (debatable), important metrics you had to measure the effectiveness of your online campaigns.
But what does a click-through really mean? It means someone came to your site. Okay. So what? What then?
1. Did they leave?
2. Did they buy something?
3. Did they spend a lot of time on the site? If so, what pages were they most interested in?
4. Do you even know what they did?
It is no longer enough just to look at your click through rate to determine if your campaign is a success. You need to ensure that you tie all of your marketing efforts in with some kind of analytics tool (e.g Google Analytics is free) so you can understand “beyond the click.”
So a home page takeover ad drove hundreds of clicks – did that mean anything? Some say brand awareness. If everyone stayed and perused the site after clicking, perhaps, but if everyone immediately left – staying on the site for less than 10 seconds, is that really brand awareness? Maybe, but was that the objective of your ad/campaign?
I’m not saying the CTR is no longer important, it’s obviously an important part of the equation as it gives you an idea of the audience size you’re dealing with.
But from there, you need to ask yourself “Self, What did I want people to do once they got to my site?”
Use your analytics tools to find out if they did indeed do whatever it is you wanted them to do, and from there you can judge the true effectiveness of your online advertising campaigns.
It’s time to stop judging your online campaigns in a silo. Work with all your marketing teams and advertising companies to fit the pieces of the puzzle together and start to tell the story beyond the click through rate.
Photo Credit: stock.xchng/telly
Rebecca Atkinson (Muller) is a freelance web marketing/analytics consultant with more than seven years of direct experience helping businesses create and implement online marketing and communications strategies. Her clients come from all industries including finance, technology and not-for-profit. She specializes in helping her clients determine how to improve their advertising programs, focusing on visitor behaviour – beyond the inital click-through. Full bio available