Beyond click-throughs
"Click-through is very easy to do," said Miller, "but conversion tracking is much harder."
'Conversion tracking' tracks the number of people who converts to your brand because of your advertising.
To track conversion, a marketer must track what Netizens do after they have clicked through to the advertiser's site.
"If you get a creative like "Punch the monkey," which is like a little game on the banner," said Miller, "you may get a lot of click-throughs, but people are clicking on it because it's a game, they are not clicking on it because they are attracted by any offer or what's on the other side of the banner."
In fact, according to Miller, it is all too easy to serve ads that generate very high click-through rate but a very low conversion rate and vice versa.
Click-through is also unable to track the number of people who have seen the ad but resisted clicking on the banner, and come through to the advertiser's site later on.
According to Engage's own study based on its in-house aggregated data, twice as many people are seeing the ad and coming to the site later to conduct some kind of transaction as the number of people who have actually clicked on the banner.
As a result, marketers who rely on click-through rates often miss out on the overall effect of their advertising.
"If you're only measuring click-through," said Miller, "you're missing out on a huge amount of people that are seeing the ad and are responding to it at a later date."
