Clicks vs. Click Throughs and Why You Need to Understand the Difference

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

If you run advertising campaigns, you should be receiving reports from the publisher’s ad serving software/company showing you the number of impressions your ad received, as well as the number of clicks.

This information can be valuable to you as you decide whether or not to proceed with additional ad campaigns with said vendors. But what is a click, really? For vendors and ad-serving comapnies, a click can include the following:

1. People who click through to your website
2. Spiders/bots/webcrawlers trolling the net to index information and links
3. People who clicked on your ad (by accident) and realized that wasn’t the action they wanted to take and closed things down before actually visiting your site
4. Fraudulent click activities – which end up being a combination of automated clicking devices/ip addresses who never make it to your site

As you can see there are a lot of instances where a click may not be an actual click and may be inflatign your results. This is where the click-through comes in.

A click-through is exactly what it sounds like – someone has clicked on your ad and landed on your (campaign landing) page.

It can be kind of tricky to get this information, as it requires you to have your own tracking system in place that allows you to place your own click tags in your ads (as well as those from the ad serving company/publisher.) It also requires you to have the ability to place tracking code on your site to tell when someone has clicked through from an ad.

Generally speaking, if you sit down with your IT and marketing teams, you should be able to figure out a way to do this – especially if you are using some sort of paid tracking software/system.

Did you know that the variance between clicks and click-throughs can differ as much as 30-50% in some cases? Every tracking system will be different and there will always be discrepancies between data sources, but normally you look for a less than 10% differnce.

Paid Search advertisers seem to have the lowest data discrepancies, and that is because they have long since instituted double tracking and didn’t stand for the difference between clicks and click-throughs, especially because paid search is billed on a cost-per-click basis. This forced serving companies/software systems to pay attention and fix the discrepancies quickly in order to avoid losing money.

However, in banner advertising, most programs run on a Cost per Thousand (CPM) impressions basis, so it’s advantageous to the publisher to show lots of clicks and not worry about fixing any potential discrepancies. For anyone who is running banner advertising campaigns on a CPC basis, I strongly recommend you ensure there is a second tracking option in place for you to compare the numbers.

Perhaps it’s time to stop and take a second look at your advertising campaign and see how it’s really doing.

Photo Credit: iamwahid; Stock.Xchng

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26.02.2009 Banner ads, Web analytics, campaign tracking, online advertising, web marketing No Comments

A Recap of Tweetdeck’s Latest Update: Version 0.21.5b

Monday, February 16th, 2009

I’m a huge fan of the Twitter application Tweetdeck . Tweetdeck essentiatlly helps organize the often chaotic social networking site to save you time. It does this by allowing you to keep track of your followers by putting their tweets into digestable groups, among other things. One of the biggest challenges of Tweetdeck was the amount of API it sometimes sucked up if you tried to do too much in the interface and weren’t managing the number of API calls you asked the application to make in an hour.

The latest version 0.21.5b not only provides measures to address these API concerns, but adds an entire other layer to the time-saving features offered. Included below is a list of the major enhancements that I’ve been able to notice with this version. To see these in action, check out this great video tutorial by non-proft social media consultant John Haydon .

Besides the Direct Message, Reply and Retweet options, the biggest, most notable change is that when you mouse over someone’s avatar, the ‘fourth icon’ is now named Other Actions. If you choose this icon, a fly-out navigation menu appears giving you the ability to:

* Email a tweet to somone (Using the default Microsoft email of course)
* Translate the tweet (I clicked on this and nothing happened – so assume it’s for non-English tweets)
* Untranslate a tweet (Again nothing happend when I clicked this – but to assume again, I imagine it’s to undo what you translated)

Other items in the Other Actions drop down include the ability to follow or unfollow someone, Search, View the tweeter’s profile, Mark as Read, Delete, Favourite and Add to a Group.

Being able to view the profile and add to a group without the extra clicks should save a few API calls and in general makes the interface that much easier and faster to use. What will save even more of those API calls comes from some new options in the Settings tab. You now have the ability to open profiles in web pages vs. in Tweetdeck – again to save API calls. I think this is really quite brilliant.

Other new setting options include:
* Choose how many tweets to keep in a column (automatically set at 500)
* The ability to hide direct messages after you’ve sent them or tweets you’ve marked (when you restart the system)

The other big news that hashtag users will love, is that when you reply to someone who used a hashtag, Tweetdeck now automatically picks up the hashtag and puts in the reply for you. This is just another wonderful time saving measure (and will avoid some typos I’m sure).

I’m thinking there are a least a couple of other new items, so feel free to let me know what I might have missed in this list.

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16.02.2009 analytics tools, blogging No Comments

More Omniture News – A partnership with WPP

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Without turning this into an Omniture only blog, it’s hard to ignroe additional events/news happening at the company these days.

An article in DM News talks about the recent announcement of a parternship between Omniture and the WPP Group.

Besides WPP investing 25 million into Omniture – which in my opinion is a much-needed investment if Omniture hopes to try and keep up with Google, or shake the recent troubles it’s had with unhappy customers and latency issues – there will be an integration of several WPP/ 24/7 Real Media products, like Open AdStream.

This merger recognizes that neither company can afford to let the likes of Google take away their business. It also helps eliminate some of the clutter and duplication amongst web analytics platforms and companies.

It means more sharing and collaboration of tools and technology, which in the long run only benefit those using those applications. It’s much better than what either Omniture or Google was doing in terms of buying up companies and technology as it means there are two companies each with their own stakes and reputations on the line if this doesn’t work. I think it means everyone will try harder to please the other and again, means those using any of the products should win in the long run.

Of course, I’m sure there will be some interesting techinical glitches along the way, but I find this a very positive annoumcent all around.

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09.02.2009 Analytics Systems No Comments