Recently I was briefing an online campaign into a high-profile media buying agency in New Zealand. I requested they include a particular website, but they tried to discourage me from including it, citing that their average CTR (click through rate) for their display ads was lower than average.
Well, this made me stop and think. I was the Online Marketing Manager and the site in question here was a perfect fit for the target audience for our campaign, why wouldn't we want to be on that site? Surely even if we got one click for the duration of the campaign, it would be more likely to convert through to a sale than a click through from a more generic site, with a far wider demographic, such as www.nzherald.co.nz.
And then I started to wonder, who's responsibility really is it for the CTR? I mean, I would be the one coming up with the campaign, the wording, writing the brief to have the ads made and ultimately approving the ads. Surely, if I had come up with a compelling campaign that appealed to my target market, they would (hopefully) click on the banner and go to my website to sign up or purchase, regardless of the website the banner ad was displayed on. The only real challenge I had was getting the media buying agency to recommend sites where I could reach the target market I wanted to see my ad.
As an Online Marketing Manager, I firmly believe that the CTR of my banner ads (and other online marketing tools such as Google Adwords) was ultimately my responsibility. I also believe it is the responsibility of the media buying agency to be able to recommend the websites where I could best reach my target market to achieve the best possible CTRs. In no way would I ever hold a website accountable for the CTR of my creative.
Interestingly, I also came up against this same issue when trying to sell advertising space. When I was working on Clearnet.co.nz I set the site up as a publisher, to create a revenue stream from ad sales on the site. An advertiser was wary of buying advertising space because the CTR they got last time was lower than they were expecting. I asked how well their creative had performed on other sites, and it seems they were similarly disappointed.
I feel that there is a few online myths circulating the marketing world, and I believe this is one of them. CTR is ultimately the responsibility of the creative, not of the website it is posted on, assuming the website fits the target market of the campaign.
To put it another way - if you ran a TVC (television commercial) on TV One and TV2, and you got a low response from both channels, would you blame TVNZ or rework the creative? If you put different phone numbers on the ads on the different channels so you could measure the different response rates and found that your response rate on TV One was less than 20% of the response rates on other channles, would you blame TVNZ or assume that the audience watching TV One is not your ideal target market? Time for marketing professionals to stand up and take ownership for the success and failures of your campaigns. More food for thought...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Just happened onto this; while we are in the States, I think our comment will be relevant. We are very adamant with our local neighbourhood advertisers to say that we do NOT sell on click-through, and do NOT sell on conversions - what we sell is 100 percent pure display advertising. And they tell us it works. In many advertising environments, the point is not to get a click, the point is to build brand awareness. If you ARE insistent on click-through, though, I completely agree with your point - it is the ad's responsibility to communicate a message of why it should be clicked.
ReplyDelete