CTR is the Web

My friend Darren Herman has reinitiated a debate about the validity of Click Through Rate (CTR) as an online advertising metric.
On his blog he posted a great collection of quotes he obtained on the subject from some brilliant industry people. It's an important read. Interesting to me, of the 9
people asked only 1 was of the strong opinion that CTR was an important metric.

Now I understand many people in display advertising have a
vested interest in making CTR disappear as a success metric. After all 99.95%
of impressions don’t result in a click on a display ad. Any industry saddled
with such poor consumer response to their product would look at ways to
continue to validate itself to its own customers (read ad dollars) in the face
of increased channel competition (Facebook, Apple, Google).

It’s also odd that display advertising seeks to minimize the
click when every other channel on the web values it so highly. This begins of
course with Google using CTR as the primary factor for its “Quality Score”
advertising algorithm – an algo that has built the greatest Ad business the
world has ever known. But it doesn’t stop there.

CTR is incredibly important metric in Email both in open
rates and in traffic. In Affiliate Marketing EPC or ‘earning-per-click” is the
primary success metric. Of course in web site optimization UX people understand
CTR on links and navigation is the number one factor to optimizing experiences.

Part of the reason Display advertising broke was because it
was built, bought and sold based on the principles of traditional media. I
can’t see how removing the only “new media” metric it has is progress. If
anything we might want to begin to pay more attention to CTR because
traffic is the most important resource the web has to offer.

Speaking of traditional advertising I’m reminded of this
great quote by Leo Burnett from 40 some odd years ago:

“involvement and
relevancy, of course, are as important as ever, but in the advertising din of
today, unless you make yourself noticed and believed, you ain't got nothin'.”

Part of my consternation with the CTR debate is looking at CTR
in a silo and making judgments about it in respect to overall performance. The
click is but one part of the online ad experience. The click is involvement and relevancy –
the click is realtime and realtime is more important then ever in today’s
world. The click is also an important proxy for the effectiveness of creative
images and messaging.

CTR though is most important in relation to other
metrics. Site placements, keywords, conversion rates, average order values and
on and on. To effectively optimize we need to look at results across datapoints
and understand the interactions and effects. Most of all, we can always learn something
by looking at CTR. As a marketer and advertiser knowledge is my greatest asset.
Taking that learning away would be foolhardy and I’ll fight any advertising Luddite
that tries to do it. You see, that's not my cursor at the top of this post – that's my pistol.