InsightIQ Blog

Beware of Click Analytics

Nov 23 2009

I was reading the recent research from Center for Media Research and it was interesting to note that 8% of Internet Users account for 85% of all Clicks. The results indicate that the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32% of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8% of the Internet user base) accounting for 85% of all clicks.

This statistic is quite an important one because it has some very fundamental implications on the analytics. Click based analytics are no longer a reliable method for optimizing or understanding the segment behavior for ad campaigns.

Online marketers and advertisers especially have long relied on click based analytics for analysis and optimization. From an online marketing perspective, this implies that analytics and optimization should be based on conversion metrics or other financial metrics like profitability or life time value rather than pure click based analytics. For advertisers the click through metric is not the overarching performance metric but it needs to be complemented with view through analysis as well and understanding the influence of advertising on other media channels. We have observed this first hand in our work with one of our clients where a certain profile of online users tended to drive the majority of the clicks regardless of the ad type which skewed the results. There are unique analytics and data filtering techniques that can be employed to account for this type of click behavior.

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