Fat Fingers: Heavy Clickers Skew Click Through Rates

Recent research calls into ques­tion click-through rates as a pri­mary source of account­abil­ity for Inter­net dis­play adver­tis­ing aimed at brand-building. Called “Nat­ural Born Click­ers,” the study reveals that a very small group of con­sumers who are not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the total U.S. online pop­u­la­tion is account­able for the vast major­ity of dis­play ad click-through behav­ior. The study illus­trates that heavy click­ers rep­re­sent just 6% of the online pop­u­la­tion yet account for 50% of all dis­play ad clicks.

Heavy click­ers skew towards Inter­net users between the ages of 25–44, and house­holds with an income under $40,000. Heavy click­ers spend four times more time online than non-clickers, and their spend­ing does not pro­por­tion­ately reflect this very heavy Inter­net usage.

Fur­ther, pre­lim­i­nary Star­com data sug­gests no cor­re­la­tion between dis­play ad clicks and brand met­rics, and show no con­nec­tion between mea­sured atti­tude towards a brand and the num­ber of times an ad for that brand was clicked. The research pre­sen­ta­tion sug­gests that when dig­i­tal cam­paigns have a brand­ing objec­tive, opti­miz­ing for high click rates does not nec­es­sar­ily improve cam­paign performance.

“Nat­ural Born Click­ers” shows us that we can’t count on click-through rate as our pri­mary suc­cess met­ric for dis­play ads.

“While the click can con­tinue to be a rel­e­vant met­ric for direct response adver­tis­ing cam­paigns, this study demon­strates that click per­for­mance is the wrong mea­sure for the effec­tive­ness of brand-building cam­paigns,” said Erin Hunter, exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent at com­Score. “For many cam­paigns, the brand­ing effect of the ads is what’s really impor­tant and gen­er­at­ing clicks is more of an ancil­lary ben­e­fit. Ulti­mately, judg­ing a campaign’s effec­tive­ness by clicks can be detri­men­tal because it over­looks the impor­tance of brand­ing while simul­ta­ne­ously draw­ing con­clu­sions from a sub-set of peo­ple who may not be rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the tar­get audience.”

Com­ment: We’re sur­prised by these num­bers, but famil­iar with the phe­nom­ena. We’ve often been left scratch­ing our heads in won­der as what we con­sid­ered prime on-line dis­play cre­ative cre­ative per­formed far below expectations.

Another vari­able that must be taken into con­sid­er­a­tion is envi­ron­ment. From a design/user expe­ri­ence per­spec­tive, not all sites which present dis­play adver­tis­ing are cre­ated equally. Clut­tered and visu­ally noisy sites are less likely to engage users to click any of the con­tent presented–advertising or editorial–resulting in poor CTR perfomance.

Be sen­si­tive to the design envi­ron­ments into which you’re invest­ing your mar­ket­ing and brand­ing dollars.

Photo credit: tia_inspirativa

Posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 9:04 AM. Filed under: Uncategorized RSS 2.0 feed.

One Response to “Fat Fingers: Heavy Clickers Skew Click Through Rates”

1. Bruce Curley says:

   February 22, 2008 at 7:21 AM

   Great truth.

   Jacob Nielsen has been study­ing this for a decade and has many insights to offer from a dif­fer­ent perspective:

   http://www.useit.com/alertbox/application-mistakes.html

   For exam­ple, he would say…for peo­ple to see it… your “Sub­mit” but­ton below should be a 42 font rather than a 10 font.

   Good to see Latin in a title.

   Reply