Effective Display Advertising Is Not Just About A Click

Creative Commons License photo credit: Mykl Roventine

There's the website, too.

Maybe it sounds obvious, but it's anything but when you look at how online display ad campaigns are measured.  The online ad industry is crazy about clicks - maybe even obsessed.  Some of that is because clicks are the most easily commoditized part of the advertising market.  Some is because most interaction can't begin without a click kicking off the chain of events.

Either way, counting clicks is necessary, but far too often it's overemphasized when evaluating overall success.  Effectiveness and value delivered after the click is far more important to advertising's final results.  That's been borne out by a recent study by RainToday.com, which looked at professional services websites to find that the website itself factored at least somehwat in the decision to buy 74% of the time.   RainToday reports that is 23% higher than in 2003, meaning that the websites themselves are taking on more of the responsibility to close an online sale.  The last point of contact is growing in importance in the sales cycle - and for the industry in charge of the first point of contact - advertising - that means the picture is getting more complex, and what happens beyond the click is beginning to overshadow the click in the final analysis.