Click rates not always best measure of performance

With the campaign late last year for entries into the annual Bookmarks Awards, under the slogan "Be Big in Digital", 91% of the entries received as a result of the online advertising were from users who only viewed the ad, and did not click on it.

Early in September 2009, the company 365 Digital was contracted to handle the online campaign management and trafficking for the Online Publisher’s Association’s (OPA) annual Bookmarks Awards held in Johannesburg on 12 November. The Be Big in Digital rock star themed rich media ads challenged those in the know to submit their entries for the 12 awards categories to prove just how "Big in Digital" they are.

Designed and built by Lowe Bull and Stonewall respectively, the ads were served through the ADTECH Helios IQ ad server and displayed across the websites of various OPA members.

In addition to the usual impressions, clicks and click-through rate (CTR) monitored for every campaign, 365 Digital sought to measure the number of entrants that resulted directly from the campaign.

Prior to the campaign launch, an ADTECH tracking tag (also known as a beacon tag or spotlight tag) in the form of a 1x1 pixel was placed on the Bookmarks entry confirmation page to report back to the ad server. The tracking process works in that when delivering the ad, the ADTECH ad server saves a cookie once with a unique user ID on the user’s computer. With this user ID, ADTECH then identifies which user saw or clicked the ad and later landed on the page that contained the tracking tag.

The campaign ran over a period of four weeks, delivering two million of the call-for-entry ads to more than 450 000 unique users. When entries closed, a total of 53 entrants had submitted 229 entries, a 20% increase on the previous year.   Analysis of the post-impression reporting revealed that of the 53 entrants, 34 of those (64% of the total entrants received from all mediums) resulted directly from either viewing or clicking the online ads, confirming the online campaign to be the most successful element of the media plan.

Yet, the average CTR on the campaign across all ad sizes was only 0.13%, an unsuccessful result by industry standards.

In taking a closer look at the 34 entrants, only three were from those who had actually clicked on the ad and then entered; while an astonishing 31 were from users who had merely viewed the ads and entered at a later stage.

Of the entrants received as a result of exposure to the online ads, 91% were received from users who had only viewed the ad, with the times from viewing to entry ranging from as short as 50 minutes to as long as three weeks and four days – confirming that validity periods should be monitored for longer than the standard 21 days.

Had post-impression tracking not been implemented on the Bookmarks campaign, the CTR would have been the sole measure of the campaign’s overall performance. This would not have been an accurate assessment of the campaign’s success. To properly judge the performance of any online lead generation campaign, post-impression analysis is crucial, as all responses are taken into account.

From a case study published on the website of the Online Publishers Association at http://www.opa.org.za