There is an issue that we keep running into around here: measuring campaign performance. Here’s the problem: the goals of a campaign are not always inherently measurable, at least not without adding a layer of burdensome overhead – surveys, control groups, alternate flighting of campaigns, etc. A recent article in MediaPost, Online Brand Performance Isn’t Subjective: You Deliver or You Don’t, discussed this issue in some detail. The dirty reality of digital advertising is that clicks have almost no bearing on a consumer’s recall, favorability or purchase intent. I believe this is even more so the case in mobile, where large fingers and tiny screens can combine to create unprecidented levels of accidental clicks. These bear no relation to actual consumer interest in the ad.
Yet media buyers persist on measuring campaigns by click through rate, regardless of the brand goals for the campaign.
Delivering advertising to the right audience is more likely to impact the metrics that matter to brands. Click-through does not correlate to impacting those objectives. Our next challenge is to create transparent metrics that allow visibility into the impact of mobile campaigns beyond click-through. Stay tuned. It’s going to happen.