Whither The Clickers?

Last time, I explained why I don't think that clickthrough rate is a dead metric for online advertising.

But this still leaves the big questions:
Why do most campaigns have such low CTRs?
And why do so few people click at all?

I think there are two simple reasons (requiring not-so-simple fixes):
1. It takes a certain type of person to click much.
2. Most campaigns suck. Even the good ones.

A Certain Type of Person
People are people, regardless of the medium they use.
A small portion of the audience are hard-core coupon clippers, sweepstakes entrants, infomercial-callers, letter-to-the-editor-writers, and so on.

It's hardly surprising that a relatively small group of users account for the vast majority of clicks. Even if average clickthrough rates were to dramatically improve, I suspect that the heavy-clickers would keep up the pace and continue to dominate.

I don't have any stats to back me up (anybody know of a good study on the topic?) but I'd bet that this group are a strange mix of extremely high-value consumers (the type who will buy anything, who are easy to sway, and like to tell all their friends about their purchase) and virtually-no-value consumers (the type who don't actually buy anything, but browse anything and everything purely for the sake of their own curiousity). I don't think there are many of the sought after in-betweens in this group: those who browse anything and everything and become experts for their friends. Those guys need to actually be targeted properly.

Most Campaigns Suck
It's true.
Typical online ad creative is awful. Unclear message, weak call-to-action, low-quality imagery or animation, too much copy, not enough copy...
And the typical campaign is very untargeted. Who are you trying to reach? It still amazes me that the bulk of online ads aren't even geo-targeted.

Is it any wonder that very few people respond immediately to an ad that doesn't speak to them, and is just plain lousy?


If advertisers took the time and made the effort to segment (and sub-segment) their target audience, identify targeting filters and techniques, carefully select media providers (not just pick the top 10 in a category on Comscore, say), created multiple creative variations, matched creative execution to placement/audience, and other basics (that we should all understand by now)... Well, I suspect we'd see clickthrough rates improve (along with all the other applicable metrics).

Of course, I completely recognize that sometimes this just isn't realistic. Deadlines, budgets, resourcing requirements, and a thousand other obstacles get in the way.

But I'm sure there are plenty of cases where these obstacles can be avoided and the people involved just didn't bother to do things right. You could write a book on Internet advertising best practices, and hundreds of people have, yet many media planners, brand managers, creative directors, and so on simply don't apply these.

When this changes, brand marketing through online display advertising will have a chance to bounce back. Who knows? Maybe one day it will be the sexy-tactic-of-the-minute...