Click-through rate (CTR) isn’t the be all end all for MarTech execs. While CTR is a useful metric for measuring general awareness, TJ Sullivan at Digital Remedy brings some other equally important metrics to the forefront through this article.
The buying cycle is a complicated one. Customers rarely make an immediate decision after viewing a single ad, but drift along several touch-points, across different devices. Once they’ve seen an ad, they will likely conduct more research online and visit competitor sites, before deciding to make a purchase.
When considering this non-linear, but all-too-common, digital purchasing trajectory, CTR (click through rate) becomes a useful metric for measuring general awareness, while something like video completion rate (VCR) becomes more helpful in testing a video campaign’s creative impact, storytelling value, and overall quality in campaign performance.
While both CTR and VCR can be significant from a branding perspective, and branding is a vital part of the purchase funnel, advertisers need to keep their original campaign goals in mind when looking for metrics to measure ROI. For example, when the goal is to have an individual buy something, CTR does not reflect true performance, but rather highlights traction towards a final conversion. However, if sales are ultimately the measurement of success for that campaign, it doesn’t matter how many clicks it receives if it’s not generating conversions.
With individuals using multiple devices to discover, research, and click, marketers need a more precise picture into how consumers are reacting to a particular ad, and insight into how the sum of all digital marketingOpens a new window efforts, across all platforms and devices, are contributing toward the customer journey.
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A Click Does Not Always Mean Value
CTR may be an attractive and natural metric to capture, but at times, it can fail to provide a holistic view across the entire digital spectrum of consumer behavior. Advanced digital marketing tools allow us to gather more profound insights, and make it easy for advertisers to expand their KPIs (key performance indicators) beyond the amount of times an ad was displayed or clicked on. Ultimately, marketers want to understand the number of marketing dollars that were spent to get an action. They need detailed insight into conversion metrics as a whole in order to uncover optimal strategies for their campaigns.
More Metrics That Matter
For advertisers, it is far more important to hit the exact target audience with multiplatform ads using specified data targeting, rather than trying to quantify success with arbitrary metrics. Post-campaign reports that dive deeper into audience actions and trends can supply more long-term benefit to advertisers than simply posting a high CTR or VCR. When marketers place ads on multiple online channels, the answers about attribution become more difficult to define.
For these reasons, it’s critical for advertisers to think one step further than click-based metrics and, in addition, pay attention to actions that provide a more rounded view of campaign success, including CPA (cost per action). CPA empowers marketers with more metrics to understand how their audiences behave online so that they can develop effective strategies that generate meaningful engagements.
Insights That Improve Strategies
The benefit of this approach is that it provides a holistic view of the path the digital consumer takes across platforms, and across devices while also incorporating engagement, rather than a specific click. This methodology allows campaigns to be accurately measured against a higher-quality of metrics that are more in line with how customers are visiting, engaging, and converting along their journey.
The overall value of focusing on CPAs in addition to CTRs is that you can see which strategies are driving results, allowing you to shift money away from strategies that are not. Your success pivots around focusing on the methods and tactics that drive results, leaving behind those that don’t deliver.
Be Precise with Objectives
Defining marketing and sales goals is fundamental for successful measurement. CPA will require far more in-depth campaign set-up to ensure measurable objectives are identified. The only way to drive quantifiable outcomes is to clearly define the action, and optimize your campaign against a CPA. The “actions†CPAs are optimized against are the specific conversions marketers want prospects to complete. The action could range from booking a trip, setting an appointment, selling a ticket, signing up, adding an item to a cart, or checking out.
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The Bottom Line
Consumers engage with brands from multiple devices, and through numerous visits. CPA provides the ability to more accurately measure campaign metrics that follow the myriad of paths consumers take in their decisions to engage with a brand. When high ROI is the goal, marketers are smart to dig deeper and look past impressions to focus on the value of the actions their campaigns drive through CPA. Using these insights can help ensure the marketing strategies continuously improve so that dollars are properly allocated to high-performing campaigns.
CPAs provide a unified assessment of consumers across platforms so that campaigns are measured according to the best metrics, and future strategies are more aligned with what drives prospects to conversion.