Click Through vs View Through Conversions

Attribution of view through (or post view) conversions to a publisher is a significant controversy in digital media planning today. Media buyers would want to give credit for click through conversions only. Media sellers, on the other hand, want to get credit for view through conversions also. This article reviews research in the industry that has tried to answer this question and give a toolbox to the digital media planner.

Ad Clickers Don’t Convert

An influential white paper on this topic from Quantcast (one of the top digital measurement firms in the world) submits the following –

• • Clicks are Distracting for Display: Of the time spent online, 96% is spent browsing content. Less than 4% is spent on search (with high intent to click through results/ads). Or, in other words –
    • • Within the content consumers online, there are a number of prospects (96%) with latent desire to purchase the advertiser’s product.
    • • However, within these, there are relatively fewer with intent to click on ads (only 4%).
    • This latent desire can be surfaced by a well targeted display ad campaign. Ignoring this audience will lead to lost revenue. View through conversions are invaluable in this part of the advertiser’s digital funnel.

• Clickers are not Converters: The following chart contains profile of display ad clickers for an online retailer on the left. On the right is profile for converters for the same online retailer. Segments under 15, 18-24 and 65+ click more but don’t convert more. Clearly, optimising this retailer’s campaign towards clicks would waste money!

• Marketing is Not a Straight Line: Even for search ads, research shows a converter takes about 3.5 days from the click to purchase. Also, while the adoption of e-commerce continues to rise, research shows that clicks on ads continue to drop. According to Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, more than 99% of converters driven by Facebook were view through.

This shows that marketing is not one straight line. The digital marketer has to optimise multiple paths to conversion. There will be display or video ad viewers that visit. Some of them will convert directly while others will convert via retargeting or brand search ad clicks.

Other Research

There is significant research that highlights increasing complexity in the customer user journey. This requires digital marketers to use cross channel and device strategies. Thus, a one-two punch of display, video, search and social across mobile and desktop will ensure adequate coverage. Research from a study conducted by eMarketer sometime back shows that 72% of the conversions were driven by display.

Conclusions & Recommendations

Prospecting via display advertising is an important tactic for broadening the advertiser’s marketing funnel at the top. For this application, display advertising works a lot like television advertising. Both create and maintain top of the mind recall for the potential customer.

A well targeted programmatic display advertising (Digital Infusion’s Programmatic Advertising service) can surface prospects with latent desire for the advertiser’s product. In addition to identifying the right prospects, it is also critical to show them ads at the right moments. This combination increases the probability of conversion.

Even re-targeting, essentially a lower funnel tactic, generates a tonne of view through conversions in addition to click through conversions.

Clearly, the impact of this is best measured through a combination of click through and view through conversions.

A Digital Marketer’s Toolbox

One of the most common mistakes that digital marketers make is to attribute all view through conversions to the inherent pull of the brand. Google Analytics isn’t useful when measuring view through conversions especially from non-Google publishers. In this situation, a good ad server needs to be used to keep track of the advertiser’s complete funnel.

In addition to using an ad server, it is important to create robust attribution modelling so that conversions driven by all advertising can attributed to publishers used on the plan. These attributed conversions are then used to rank publishers by performance which is used to then create the next cycle’s budget.