You can see that Verdi focuses not only on HOW well a campaign performs, but rather WHO – which specific prospects – perform best. At this level of targeting and analytical detail, our clients gain insights that are more actionable – and that more readily translate to increasing their campaign ROI.

The same is true with the basic monitoring of digital display advertising campaigns. 

Many of us “grew up” in the world of Paid Search, where CLICKS are the on center-stage. However, the world of TARGETED DISPLAY advertising now gives us much more visibility “beyond the click” – into the attribution of conversions from a variety of different contact methods.

With this level of measurement, we’ve discovered some interesting facts:

• Most (>99%) viewers DON’T click on a display ad, but they do BUY after seeing the ad.
• There are people who click-through. And there are people who convert. But they are NOT necessarily the same people.
• Mostly, they’re not. A study last year by comScore and Pretarget showed almost a ZERO correlation between clicks and conversions. A 0.01 value on the Pearson correlation coefficient.

According to Kirby Winfield, SVP of comScore,   “It once again demonstrates the perils of relying on click-throughs for measuring performance of display ad campaigns – with this metric showing virtually zero correlation to total conversions.”

With Household-Specific Ad Serving, we can verify with 100% accuracy that an ad was served multiple times to a specific prospect who has converted. But how did they convert if they didn’t click-through?

Well, they may have Googled the brand independently, then visited the client’s site and converted. We call these either “view-throughs” or view-based conversions. Or they many have contacted the client’s sales team or resellers via phone, email, chat, or social media. Or in the case of a retail store or resort location, they may have simply dropped by to visit.

Just how significant are these other conversions vs. click-based conversions?

For an e-commerce brand, click-throughs provide a large share of conversions. However, for offline commerce – or a multi-step, high-ticket, or “considered” purchase – it’s a much different story…

To monitor ad impressions, frequency and clicks, we utilize our servers and network partners. But beyond that, we place ad-specific tracking tags on key pages of our clients’ sites to monitor “view-throughs.”  And then post-campaign, we download the client’s data file of buyers and match them with the households to which we know we served ads.

This presents a much more complete picture of WHO is converting and what channels they use.

In fact, we’ve learned that for many product and service categories, the client’s click-based conversions can be less than 5% (that’s FIVE PERCENT) of all conversions from the same ads.

Ironically, many clients and agencies still fixate on clicks – even though for many categories the vast majority of conversions are NOT click-based.

With any luck, that will change in the coming months and years. But meanwhile, here at Verdi we’re happy to be able to see the full picture.