IAB UK, the trade association for the digital advertising industry, this week celebrated the first National Anti-Click-Through Rate Day (NACTRD) as it launches its Measurement Toolkit.
The organisation sent a “Dear John”-style open letter to hundreds of advertisers and marketers accusing them of becoming “clickheads”, a tongue-in-cheek castigation of the industry’s reliance on vanity metrics to measure the effectiveness of online media.
The lighthearted day of action aimed to raise awareness of failings in measuring the effectiveness of digital advertising, with NACTRD a mechanism to land some serious messages with the industry.
The IAB Measurement Toolkit consolidates current best practices and provides guidance on measuring digital advertising in the context of other media. It sets out the main models and techniques that can be used to measure digital advertising, from big picture approaches (e.g. econometrics) to more granular analyses (e.g. attribution modelling), showing how they fit together and how to use them. The guide concludes with a set of practical templates and checklists for creating your own measurement strategy.
Commenting on the launch of National Anti-Click-Through Rate Day, IAB UK CMO James Chandler said “Advertisers increasingly rely on click-through-rates to justify their marketing spend to the CFO but it’s not a reliable metric for effectiveness and only tells half the story. That’s why our message to the industry today is simple: don’t be a clickhead.”
Commenting on the Measurement Toolkit, IAB UK Chief Digital Officer, Tim Elkington said “Advertisers are faced with growing complexity and an increasing number of methodologies for ad measurement. This has created silos of expertise in organisations based around specific objectives and tools rather than supporting one unified, balanced approach. Our IAB 2018 survey of brands found that 83 percent of brands view cross-media measurement as their single biggest measurement challenge. Our guide seeks to address this by focusing on how to measure advertising effectiveness and business outcomes across different media channels.”