Thorny issue of measurability opens door to post-click era

The great promise of the internet, at least as far as advertisers were concerned, was its measurability. You placed an ad on a Web page and you knew how many people responded to it by counting the number of click-throughs. In reality it was always more complicated than that; people saw the ad, didn’t click on it and bought the product from a shop three days later. Or they clicked and then didn’t buy because the product wasn’t what they wanted or because the page the click took them to was so confusing that they gave up. But the principle remained, and an industry was built on it.

However, that principle has come under significant scrutiny in recent months. Last month, I wrote about Google and Microsoft’s trials of technology intended to break the current rule of “last click wins” and apportion credit for sales more equitably along the customer journey. But at the same time the changing landscape of interactive media is having an impact on the way people think about the importance of the click.

The reason for this is the rise of social media; blogging, social networks and so on. In this world the effectiveness of a piece of marketing communication can rarely be measured by counting clicks. Instead a raft of tools have been developed to measure the buzz generated on blogs, in chatrooms and in forums.

These tools will be familiar to anyone who’s worked in offline marketing and PR, since they involve techniques such as counting the number of people talking about the product or service in question, balancing those who are enthusiastic against those who are critical, and measuring the amount of coverage each side of the argument gets. The currency in these environments is engagement and advocacy. What it doesn’t tend to involve is clicks.

If you don’t work in interactive marketing, this may not seem like a problem. You might even permit yourself to gloat that the online industry isn’t so smart after all, since it has had to return to such pre-digital approaches.

But you might also find that the absence of what we might call traditional interactive measurement methods is proving a barrier to your company taking advantage of social media.

This came to my attention a little while ago, when the heads of a couple of digital agencies said they were struggling to sell social media approaches to their clients, not because the clients couldn’t see the significance of such emerging media properties as MySpace or Facebook, but because of the way the results would be measured.

Interactive media has done such a good job of persuading everybody that its measurability is the solution to traditional marketing problems of attribution that marketing people are demanding similar measurability from non-digital media. But it also suggests that many digital marketers are so tightly bound to click-through rates, either by inclination or by the way their own performance is measured, that they can’t accept any other metrics.

Combined with the move away from “last click wins”, the first thing this suggests is a maturing of the interactive marketing industry; a recognition of the need for a more sophisticated view of people’s online behaviour. This is not to devalue the importance of direct response, simply a recognition that clicks are not the only actions possible, or even desirable.

Following on from this, the second thing that the post-click environment highlights is the pressing need for an integrated measurement currency. This has been under discussion for at least five years, with little progress to be seen. But as the media landscape continues to change and more people spend more time in social media environments at the expense of traditional media properties, the need to reconcile marketing activities across the two becomes more acute. While Facebook may have hit the headlines recently with its falling user numbers, most industry watchers agree that this is much more likely to represent a stabilisation around core users than any decline of interest in social networking. Certainly other networks such as Bebo and LinkedIn are continuing to grow, while new, more targeted networks continue to spring up.

Meanwhile, the final consideration that emerges from this post-click world is that any company that still splits its digital marketing people out from the rest of its marketing department, and measures their performance in a different way, should think again. Separate digital marketing departments were common in the early years of this decade, but as the interdependence of online and offline marketing became apparent, and the synergies between them began to be measured, departments (and agencies) began to be reintegrated. The realisation that organisational structures and performance measurement mechanisms could be a barrier to adopting the latest marketing platforms should be enough to call time on any remaining separation.

Michael Nutley is editor-in-chief of New Media Age