Source: Campaign
The Internet Advertising Bureau UK has accused advertisers of being “clickheads” in their new initiative that calls for adoption of better measurement standards for online advertising.
The digital ad industry trade body has sent an open letter to more than 100 brands – including BMW, Diageo, Ford, John Lewis, Mondelez International, Netflix, Procter & Gamble, Sky and Unilever – in which it calls time on the industry’s reliance on “vanity metrics” such as click-through rates to measure the effectiveness of online media, Campaign reports.
In the letter, IAB slams advertisers of being “clickheads” warning against the use of CTR metrics. As part of this initiative, the IAB has proclaimed 12 February as Anti-Click-Through Day, launched its Measurement Toolkit for best practice on measuring digital ads, and has created a video showing how they ‘infiltrated’ UK media agencies to delete CTRs from their reports.
The CTR metric has been criticised for years. In 2014, Mel Exon, Bartle Bogle Hegarty London’s then chief digital officer, described CTRs as “simply undead” because it still showed up on media reports “in the absence of anything else deemed useful”.
The IAB says its Measurement Toolkit sets out the main models and techniques that can be used to measure digital advertising, from big-picture approaches including econometrics to granular analyses such as attribution modelling.
