Measuring Campaign Success Beyond CTR

by | Oct 18, 2022

After launching a campaign targeting farmers, ranchers or retailers, marketing managers in the agriculture industry (like those in most other fields) tend to watch one metric: click-through rate (CTR). That’s the number we’ve all been taught to value. If the CTR is high, your data vendor points to it to prove that your money has been well-spent. But are you truly getting enough bang for your buck?

While CTR is, no question, an important measure of how successfully you’re driving traffic to your website, consider that the rate of clicks per impression only accounts for 0.5% of all impressions. For a clearer understanding of your campaign’s success, you need to look at the other 99.5% impressions. To accurately assess the value of those impressions, you need to know who is seeing your ad. Reaching the right audience, not simply amassing a certain number of clicks, holds the key to your success.

Are You Reaching Your Target?   

To determine the value of the other 99.5% of impressions, ask yourself some questions. Does your data vendor have access to first-party agriculture data solely containing your target audience? Is the campaign only reaching that audience? If the answers to those questions are “yes,” then every impression is valuable because even if viewers don’t click, they’re seeing your message. You’re generating awareness within the audience that is most likely to be interested in that message — and, ultimately, to buy your product or service.

Of course, if your vendor is just relying on look-alike models and intersecting third-party data, then you’re not gaining this vital awareness within the audience you’re seeking. With Precision Reach’s data-driven programmatic offering, for example, we optimize for audience first, followed by your desired campaign metric, such as clicks, viewability, video completion rate or conversions. Because we’re using first-party data, we’ve already identified the audience, so every click has value. Every impression is served to an agriculture audience that you would consider a prequalified lead.

Metrics Beyond CTR

Rather than limiting your measurement to CTR, ask how many members of your ag audience segment did your ad reach. How many farmers saw it? And do you know who they are? Can your vendor break down the impressions by month, day and geography? Looked at in this way, the key to your campaign becomes more about knowing your audience and reaching it than about simply focusing on the number of clicks you manage to generate.

Another option is to work with a programmatic vendor to set up conversion tracking on your campaign.  This approach allows you to see view-through conversions. You will know how many viewers saw your ad and later converted. After all, your goal is a conversion, and it doesn’t require a click.

Your data vendor needs to use audience segment-driven strategies and must be able to target your audience precisely. Let’s say you want to target wheat growers farming more than a thousand acres in Minnesota and the Dakotas with a message announcing a new biological product. Is your data vendor capable of targeting, reaching and measuring that audience? Or is your money simply being spent to generate a certain number of anonymous clicks from rural areas in those states? It’s safe to say that clicks by viewers outside your target ag segment aren’t going to lead to conversions.

When you rely on accurate, first-party data to precisely determine who you’re reaching, the other 99.5% of impressions becomes a very important part of your campaign and a valuable way of measuring your success.

Interested in learning more about Precision Reach? Get in touch.