Used to be that clickthrough rates ruled the ad measurement tool box. They were—and perhaps still are—the fundamental way of measuring an online ad’s performance. But times and consumers have changed, and social media is making engagement a lot easier to measure, so clicks are now being judged a bit old-fashioned and not very informative.
RICG has a post outlining two competing positions on the usefulness of clickthrough rates as a measure of marketing ROI. James Burrows argue that they can help create a better picture of an ad strategy's success. But Manu Mathew alleges that the clickthrough rate is dead and has given way to other metrics that track the marketing experience as a whole.
Last month, Google reported that banner ad clickthroughs continue to drop, down 0.09% in 2010, compared to 0.1% in 2009 (see the mashable report here).
So what do you think? Are clickthroughs still relevant? What do they really measure? Are other measures more useful? Please leave a comment or take the poll to the right. --WTP
“Data will become the new soil in which our ideas will grow, and data whisperers will become the new messiahs.” 
I think CTR's on their own are meaningless.
Other performance indicators like bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit, etc... will tell you if it was quality traffic or not.
Your CTR could be extremely high, but if your other visitor performance indicators are poor, it means your ad is too widely targeted and you have not properly isolated your audience.
The opposite means there could be room for you to expand your target. Takes a bit to find a balance.
But that all means nothing unless you can tie it to your businesses KPI's ;)
Posted by: MatthewRideout | September 13, 2011 at 06:15 PM
Good points, Matthew. Especially about the KPIs. All the web stats in the world don't mean much if you can't relate them to business progress.
Posted by: Bill Paarlberg | September 15, 2011 at 07:53 AM