Ethan Decker’s Post

View profile for Ethan Decker

Founder @ Applied Brand Science. Helping marketing teams raise their game with brand science.

DOES CLICK-THROUGH RATE ACTUALLY MATTER? Like, what does it tell you, and what does it get you? Nielsen studied nearly 500 global campaigns and found… nada. Zip. Zilch. Did CTR correlate with ad recall? Nope. Less than 1%, in fact. How about brand awareness? Nope. Or purchase intent? Nope nope. Both less than 1%. But surely ROI? Ha. ROI had a -0.07% correlation with CTR. 😂 Even FACEBOOK knows this. Yes this data is “old.” But things haven’t changed much. In fact, the main thing that’s changed in 10 years is now upwards of 70%-80% of clicks are FRAUDULENT: bots or other “creative accounting.” SO SOME LESSONS: 1. Don’t use CTR as a proxy for any other brand or sales metrics. 2. Maybe don’t buy online media based on the CTR. 3. Do the hard math to find out what makes ads effective for _your_ brand. ————————————— 🍊 SUBSCRIBE to the Irregular News at appliedbrandscience dot com 🍊 GET MORE BRAND SCIENCE: talks, training, brandfixing

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Lee Powney

C-suite growth advisor

9mo

I'd like to find the one person in the western hemisphere that was surprised by this post and ask them why.

It's wild to me. I own $200,000 of items and have never clicked on an ad for those things. I've clicked on about 100 ads ever, and don't own any of those things. The entire industry optimizes against entirely the wrong metrics because they are easy ( and cheap and fast ) to see and impact.

is this data coming from the survey Nielsen did 10 years ago? Or did they do a new study recently?

Ed Trotter

EU Head of Business Development @ MassiveMusic

9mo

I thought we'd all abandoned CTR about 10+ years ago?

So, what's the alternative?

Roger Jackson

CEO Shopper Intelligence. An up-to-date source of how each category plays in every retailer from the point of view of the shopper. Founder Sensecheck.com - our huge panel of experienced marketers help SMEs succeed.

9mo

"70 - 80% of clicks are fraudulent", whats the source?

Seb Bardin

Full stack growth marketing leader | E-commerce, Digital Marketing, Performance & Retail Media, Omnichannel, Trading & Transformation

9mo

It's 2024 and there are still some places that will tell you that "our campaign was successful because we got a CTR higher than the industry benchmark "

George Terry

Co-Founder @ Winbox | LinkedIn Ads Agency

9mo

Such a good point. The issue here for a lot of ad managers is that CTR isn’t the best metric, but it’s usually the most available cc Marc Woodland

Andrew Tindall

The World’s Best Ads & Why They Work | SVP @ System1 | Marketing Effectiveness

9mo

How did you recreate this graph?! 😂

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