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Is CTR useless? Are marketers looking at the wrong metrics?
- jacquesm 17y agoCTR is useless without hard numbers on clickfraud. If every click was a 'real' click then it would go a long way towards getting an idea about conversion rates and so on on new traffic to your site. With clickfraud an unknown all the numbers that depend on it are also unknowns. There was a time that we spent a ton of money on adwords, it started off real well, then after a while we realized we were still paying about the same money as before, but no sales came out of the traffic that we bought. There are some really tricky things going on here, one of them is that as long as advertisers don't wise up to CTR not being a very relevant metric (end-to-end conversion is) that there is very little incentive to combat click fraud, as long as it is not too blatant. It directly increases the bottom line for the middlemen, and the defrauders both, at the expense of the advertisers. Your tracking has to be very precise to document exactly which users are fraudulent and which ones are not. Simple checks such as seeing how 'deep' a user goes on your page, or whether or not they get style sheets and other static stuff no longer is enough to make a classification. Impression based metrics are even worse. The only system that comes anywhere near working is performance based advertising, but that can be very hard to couple to a large number of products.