Clickthroughs are a trap

Way back in 1995 I helped launch the first website I ever worked on, for The Wall music stores. (Music stores? Just how old am I??). And honestly from that day until now, thirty years later, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been in conversation with Clients and the key metric identified for a digital campaign is a clickthrough rate (CTR.) Here’s the thing: CTRs are a great vanity metric. They’re a signal, but nothing more. They can make us all feel great that we’re delivering value (“look how high our CTR is!”) but in reality, they tell us very little about whether the work is actually delivering value to the Client’s business.

Your campaigns deserve meaningful metrics

Building a great financial services campaign, with sharp creative and great targeting, is hard. It takes a lot of people pulling in the same direction all with a key goal in mind. Don’t let everyone take the easy way out with a topline metric that doesn’t stay ruthlessly focused on your business goal. Instead, stay focused on ensuring you’re driving the right customer behavior. To do that you need deeper metrics, especially if you’re anywhere in the mid to lower sales funnel.  Things like:

• Completing a prequalification check
• Intent to apply
• Application completion
• Request for more information
• Repeat visits to product pages

Metrics like the above shed light on if we’re reaching the right people and whether the story we’re telling them is motivating them to act. Anything else is window dressing, and a quick way to spend a lot of money with very little impact.

Meaningful metrics require you to connect more dots

One reason CTR continues to pop in briefs and Client conversations is that they’re easy to track. Getting beyond those clicks? That can be more challenging, especially if you’re working within a legacy technology framework at a big financial institution. But challenging doesn’t mean not doable, and if you can connect those dots, the benefit far outweighs the angst of getting there. (I know, easy for me to say, but trust me on this one.)

When we’re looking at analytics from campaigns and rely on our Clients to provide us data, we ask them to get us as close as possible to the real business goal, meaning:

• How many people came through the campaign and applied?
• Which of the creative executions provided the greatest volume of applications? Which provided the greatest number of approved applications?
• Where are people abandoning in the funnel?
• Are the customers we acquired through the campaign using the product? Are they using it more or less than people who came through other channels? After a decade of experience helping financial brands, we know that putting the wrong product in your customer’s hands is almost as bad as the customer not clicking through.  

Those are only four examples of questions that do a much better job of moving beyond feel-good metrics, to ones that help uncover if the thinking is meeting the real business goals.

Reduce the distractions and noise

To be clear, CTR has a role in a campaign’s analytics. It just can’t be the starring role. In other words, it should be the start of the discussion, not the end. If you gain alignment with your internal stakeholders and agency partner that the work is being measured and evaluated based on true business results—whether that’s completed applications, long-term value, or something in between —from the initial brief, your impact to the business will already have a leg up even before the concepting and media planning begin. Because at that point you’ll have removed vanity and distractions from the brief and instead provided your agency a clear path at knowing what success looks like.

What to do now

If your business is focused only on measuring signals and not real metrics, here’s a few things to do right now:

• Talk to your technology partners. Does your company have the infrastructure in place to measure from view, to click, to action? If not, what steps can you take to start to close those gaps?
• Take a hard look at your briefs. What are you challenging your agency to deliver? Make sure that they don’t lose sight of the real metrics you can measure that get as close to the end business goal as possible.
• Measure and discuss frequently. The frequency will depend upon your investment and timeline but make sure that all parties involved are seeing the same data and working together to understand what it’s telling you about the success (or not) of the campaign.
• Refine and relaunch. Take those learnings to refine the work and relaunch the campaign. And then keep doing that.

When all the above is said and done you can still be proud of an amazing CTR the work delivered. But you’ll be prouder that in your next business review you can point to hard metrics showing the actual impact you’ve had on the business.