A new study looking at mobile advertising has found that click-through rates (CTR) are not nearly as important as many people think. The study was paid for by xAd and performed by Nielsen, and looked at a number of different factors including how valuable specific stats can be for marketers using mobile platforms.
The data was gathered by looking at 80 different campaigns for 12 national brands. Within these campaigns there were about 200 million impressions, so this is a significant sized study. The study found that the CTR by itself is an extremely poor indicator of how well any specific ad will actually perform. In fact, the study said this stat is “completely unrelated, or even negatively correlated, to other measures capturing metrics such as calls, directions and store visits.”
In addition, they found that when mobile ads are specifically optimized to improve CTR, their performance for other activities goes down. This likely means that the average marketer who is pushing CTR will end up paying more per click and get worse results than someone who designs their campaign with another goal in mind.
This will be a very important study for many marketers who have long been focusing nearly exclusively on getting more clicks. The problem with this strategy, as the study shows, is that it focuses far to much effort on only driving traffic. This isn’t a bad strategy when it comes to organic traffic, but when you are paying for it, you need to be far more concerned with conversions.
You can see the full study HERE.
