Moving Beyond CTR: How To Establish A North-Star Metric With DCO

Why Brands Need To Master Metrics To Truly Meet Their Business Goals From Digital Marketing Channels.

Lowering Customer Acquisition Costs is a great example of a broad business objective that has long been the ultimate goal but can sometimes seem secondary to marketers’ campaign metrics.

Businesses are doubling down on marketing efficiency to improve their ROI from digital campaigns and simply counting clicks does not help achieve that goal.

The IAB agreed and rolled up its sleeves to start aiding the marketing community by collaborating with partners on how to ‘ditch’ the clicks and move towards better measurement. With the campaign tagline of “Don’t Be A ‘Clickhead’”, the sentiment was clear: brands need to move away from CTR tunnel-vision.

The Challenge With CTR

CTRs are a good metric to evaluate whether end users are connecting with the messaging communicated in the ad creative. However for the most part, clicks and CTR are a sub-metric of the path-to-conversion rather than the end goal.

• Are clicks turning into website engagement or increasing bounce rates?

• Could more expensive clicks actually translate to higher-intent users moving down the funnel? 

• Is an offer reeling people in and resulting in high CTRs but low conversion rates? Is that landing page experience conducive to a conversion happening?

• Are fraudulent and non-human clicks being filtered out?

• Is the business goal all about increasing conversion volumes or more focused on higher average order values?

Throwing away CTR altogether is not the solution but brands should consider how clicks contribute to success in their business goals and one of many levers to pull to optimize performance

Defining A North-Star Metric

Delivering more value for every marketing dollar spent means aligning on a North-Star Metric and all sub-metrics that indicate success towards it across the marketing funnel. 

Here’s an example looking at the Automotive industry; where we have worked extensively with brands on their path to successful personalization.

North-Star Metric: Test Drives Booked: In this case the focus is on Booking Test Drives and measuring the Conversion Rate from this lead-generating event as most of the car sales actually happen offline.

The brand focused on retargeting Engaged Visits, using DCO to take into account car configurations and user geolocation to show an ad directing audiences to their local dealership with a map and a booking CTA.

Sub-Metric: Engaged Visit: The Auto brand looked at the behavior that generated leads, noting high engagement on-site: scrolling car models, starting car configuration, exploring dealership locations and longer session times. The brand could then individually optimize towards these Engaged Visits to single out users with intent in the consideration phase that could be moved to a qualified lead.

Sub-Metric: Clicks: DCO makes it easy to create ad variations showcasing different car models, features, use cases for different audience groups with plenty of different approaches to copy to see what resonates with users. Ads then land users directly on the car configurator with the same model and color, encouraging experimentation. Personalized creative helps improve CTR and bring more users to the website to build up a pool of users to retarget.

Sub-Metric: Impressions: By keeping targeting broad in the DSP, leaving decisioning to Jivox, the brand is able to keep CPMs low and maximize reach.

There could be varying north-star metrics for your business; Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), Cost Per Lead, Passengers Booked, Cost per Conversion, Brand Lift, Average Order Value and more.

Optimizing For Your North-Star Metric Effectively

As marketers have many levers to pull to influence a north-star metric; they need to be able to track these various sub-metrics in real-time so they can be responsive to changes in performance.

With Jivox IQ Blaze Analytics, brands can:

• Create Custom Liveboards to pin the North-Star Metric and corresponding sub-metrics to get instant actionable insights that update in real-time. This keeps the entire marketing team on the path towards optimizing the same business goal.
• Set KPI Alerts to Monitor the North-Star Metric and contributors with instant email notifications based on thresholds surpassed or set to a regular cadence for visibility without even heading into the Liveboard.
• Roll Jivox DCO campaign data into your BI tool of choice to measure how website engagement, order revenue and customer acquisition costs are affected by paid media campaigns.