You’ve been measuring your display click through rate wrong
If you think you've perfected your understanding of click through rates, it's probably worth casting a quick eye over this piece by Bohemia Group's Victor Condogeorges.
Every time you’ve run a creative comparison on your digital display activity, you’ve most likely done it wrong.
When trying to identify which creative best leads users to click or interact, you probably haven’t taken these factors into consideration.
Some common pitfalls overlooked when running creative tests include:
- Different sized banners – Yes, the chances of a user clicking on a 300 x 250 are different to a 300 x 600.
- Different publishers – Not all publishers put banners in the same place. Their prominence and likelihood to catch attention will change.
- Viewability – Did users have the same opportunity to see and click both creatives? Probably not.
Let’s look into that last one a bit more. It’s an interesting element that seems obvious when you think about it but is so often overlooked.
Imagine you’re running a programmatic display campaign and want to know which creative out of four has been delivering the highest click-through rate. They’re all different sizes and they’re running on all different websites so your test is already a mess.
Here their results side by side with metrics so basic they’re ordering a pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks.
From this, you can tell Creative D has the highest CTR and has delivered the most clicks.
Case closed, put it all on Creative D, right?
Let’s take a closer look at those numbers and include the most important metrics that need to take place for someone to click. In between impressions and clicks, we have viewable impressions. You know, because it has to be seen to be clicked?
Woah, what happened here? The CTR based on viewable impressions has completely turned the tables on the creative! Turns out Creative A really gets people clicking but the fact that they only see it 14% of the time washed out the real CTR.
If you hadn’t taken the non-viewable impressions into account, your optimisation efforts would have been misguided. Think about this next time you’re running a creative test to find the clickiness of banners.
Just ask: Did both of the creatives have the same opportunity to be clicked?
Victor Condogeorges is digital investment director at Bohemia Group. This article first appeared on LinkedIn.
You’re right, but that’s some poor experiment design if you’re not controlling other variables.
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Or you could just look at CPC/CPA…skip the extra calculations and go straight to what’s delivering your best investment…
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Come on mate, give them media folks a break. Concept of ‘Controlling other variables’ is beyond media agency folks…
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Surely everyone knows it depends what the campaign goal is?
If the goal is traffic, there’s no point optimizing to Creative A if you aren’t going to lift the view-ability rate.
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