Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Questioning Vailidity Of Click Thrus

Posted by Anonymous on 2/18/2010 at 5:15 PM ET 250 Points
I sell display advertising for an online news site in Canada. (I have also sold radio, TV, newspaper & magazines)
The frustration in trying to get clients to understand the value of ‘impressions’ vs ‘click-thrus’, can be overwhelming at times. I ran into a situation yesterday, where a client cancelled an annual contract based on ‘referral’ information from a “Google Analytics” report. Unfortunately, this client deals with a (self-proclaimed) local ‘agency’, which would rather cancel according to her wishes, than make any effort to explain to her WHY she should not place so much value on questionable click throughs.
I have a question I’d like to ask you, as I am at a complete LOSS as to how to explain the following:

Our closest competitor, which is the daily newspaper on line, has only 10% the traffic our site has. An identical display as was put on both sites, and the GA report claims that the other site generated 444 referrals with a bounce rate of 75.90%, and avg time spent as ONLY 32 seconds.
In contrast, the report claims our site generated only 21 referrals with a bounce rate of 42.86%, and avg time spent as 3 minutes & 22 seconds.

These stats seem completely illogical to me. I am inclined to believe that the daily newspaper may be quickly clicking on & off their advertisers ads, just to inflate the numbers….and in turn, mislead the advertisers as to the value/performance of their ads.

Am I grasping at straws here? Could there be any other explanation that makes any sense?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by thecynicalmarketer on 2/18/2010 at 9:15 PM Accepted
    I agree, the numbers don’t add up (even if they are committing fraud).

    They have roughly 2x the bounce rate, but even if we double the average time on the site, that still places them at 1/3 of the time spent by your referrals on the same landing page. Something just doesn't add up.

    Your client should be looking at conversions anyway (which they may already be doing). You are stating with a 20:1 deficit going in, so it would be hard to make up that difference.

    Is your audience substantially different from the local paper, and which one is more closely aligned with the client's offering?

    JohnnyB
  • Posted on 2/20/2010 at 8:54 AM Accepted
    That does seem odd. However, assuming the numbers are accurate, the (smaller) audience on your site was much more engaged and interested in your content than the newspaper's audience.

    Do you have information about the demographics of the two sites?

    What really matters isn't the number of visitors, it's the number of conversions, and the ROI.

    The world's greatest ad for snow boots won't get many buyers if it's seen only by people who live in the tropics.

    Jodi
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