Make Digital Media Meaningful—Say Goodbye to CTR

The time has come, and it is long overdue. We need to retire using click-through rates (CTR) as a performance metric that defines success on digital display advertising or social campaigns. Sure, it served us well in the early days of digital advertising as a reliable metric we could count on. But now? Let's make digital media meaningful and say goodbye to CTR being the sole measure of success.

Display Advertising: Complexity and Meaningful Measurement

As the digital display advertising landscape has become more complex, CTR falls short in connecting the dots and driving results. Many channels and tactics come into play with campaign execution, and CTR is rarely going to provide the most meaningful results towards an agency or brand's overall business objectives.

Ask yourself: what meaning has come from CTR recently? If site traffic is the ONLY goal you care about as an outcome from digital display advertising, then consider moving to a Landing Page View (LPV) goal. This can help bridge the gap between driving site traffic and a user’s time spent on a page. Facebook pushed for this shift from CTR to Landing Page Views in 2018 to combat “clicky” behavior from users and drive more meaningful and efficient performance. Centro quickly adopted this best practice and saw very strong results across many verticals.

If you are looking to move drive stronger results for your brand, then let's all agree to put CTR away. Instead, focus on getting those pixels placed!

Pixel Your Path

Laying out a clear and concise pixel strategy by identifying key actions on the site to track, and ultimately, the most valuable or final action a user can take, provides the opportunity for far more actionable insight for all display advertising campaigns. Not only will you be able to understand true efficiency against media dollars in getting a user to act or convert, but this also creates more clarity around the customer journey.

Here is where the meaning comes in. By understanding your audience's path to conversion, more measurement and analytic solutions arise. From implementing a DMP strategy – to the use of attribution modeling, to testing new creative messaging—all these opportunities and more, can now come into play.

The Big Picture

Based on current global, economic, and cultural conditions for the foreseeable future—meaningful approaches to support digital media and display advertising efforts should pay off in the long-run. This time has forced many advertisers to pause, reflect, and reframe their messaging. It is an opportune period to find ways to be precise, deliberate, thoughtful, and thorough in digital media and display advertising executions.

Centro is here to help navigate these difficult times. We highly recommend tuning into Centro’s most recent webinars about Industries in Flux: Advertising Through Crisis and Industries in Flux: State of QSR’s. We also recommend checking out a recent blog post about How COVID-19 is Changing Media Consumption and the most recent Digital Innovations Awesome List, which compiles the latest trade pubs and trends.

As we face a new frontier in every facet of our lives, let us reflect and act on moving digital media into having a positive and meaningful impact in the future. Trust us when we say: the future is free of CTR.