Click-Thru Rates Are Misleading Brand Marketers
On Online Campaign Performance: Nielsen

From Adoimagazine

-Cross-platform advertising improve brand campaign performance

-Extended online exposure achieves strong lift in brand performance metrics

-Long-form online video content achieves higher engagement levels

-Digital trumps traditional media for return on investment

Click-thru rates, one of the most common metrics used to trade online advertising, are significantly undervaluing the brand performance of online campaigns, signaling a need for marketers to use other metrics to gauge the effectiveness of online advertising, according to analysis released today by Nielsen, a leading global provider of insights and information on what consumers watch and buy. Whilst click-thru rates are commonly used as the only metric to gauge the performance of online campaigns, Nielsen notes that there is little correlation between online click-thru rates and off-line return on investment (see chart 1).

“The implications of this insight are far-reaching, both with respect to the metrics being used to track online campaign performance, and in guiding creative strategy,” emphasizes David Webb, Nielsen’s Managing Director of Advertising Solutions in the APMEA Region. “Whilst the use of click-thru rates as a metric is still an effective means of measuring call-to-action campaigns, using the same metric to measure the success of a branding campaign is misleading and potentially dangerous. There are a number of alternative metrics advertisers can tap into where they are looking to achieve broader brand benefits, and these metrics will help them to assess campaigns which are intended to deliver their key message.”

The Nielsen analysis, which combined meta-analysis and modeling from hundreds of marketing campaigns, identified that campaigns which utilize both television and online channels generate an up-lift in critical brand metrics including brand recall, message recall and likeability. General brand recall metrics achieve an average of 22 percent increase where television campaigns are run in parallel with online campaigns, whilst brand recall achieves an up-lift of 50 percent on average and message recall and likeability both achieved a 67 percent up-lift on average (see chart 2). Importantly,

Nielsen notes that the brand metrics most likely to improve as a result of cross-platform advertising are also the metrics which have been most closely linked to increased sales. “The results from this analysis are helping to shine new light on how digital marketing, especially those which leverage cross-platform, can have a direct impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions,” notes Webb. “To date, marketers have been reluctant to invest in digital marketing due to a lack of clarity around the brand benefits and direct return on investment. Analysis such as this is addressing that lack of insight.”

Another notable insight from Nielsen’s analysis relates to the capping of impressions for online

campaigns – although it is widely accepted that online campaigns should be capped at between three to five impressions, Nielsen’s analysis illustrates that extended online campaigns with a higher number of impressions (in particular those with eight or more impressions) achieve a stronger lift in brand performance metrics.

View the charts and full article here.