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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