I hate the click.  We obsess about clicks.  We track clicks.  We pay for clicks.  We want more and more clicks.  We are click-absorbed and it is time to make online marketing about more than this.  This week marked the 15th anniversary of the first online banner ad so I have chosen this time to launch a revolt against the single-minded click-only metrics that prevail today.I recently read this great article by Scott Severensen that suggests 5 things you can do today to start moving beyond clicks.  Here’s why I think this is important:

• If you track online marketing conversions back to the nearest click that precedes them it will always make things like search and email marketing campaigns look like they are tactics driving revenue.  They may be but they are more likely to be just the only thing you are tracking.  Many steps usually lead up to that precious moment wherein a user types your name into a search engine, finds you and buys your thing.  Be careful not to over-attribute revenue generating actions to just the nearest measurable click.
• Benchmarking is forgotten yet it is a very valid method of tracking.  “My metric was X before I did these three things and now it is X+25%.  That means these three things are likely to be good things to keep doing…and doing them together.”  Maybe one of those three things was a search marketing campaign that got a lot of clicks.  If you had not done it in concert with the overall campaign might not have worked so well.
• Display ads (banners) don’t get many clicks.  That does not mean that they have no value.  You have to develop other ways of monitoring their impact on awareness, intent to purchase and the impact that they may have on overall site visitorship outside of the direct clicks they generate.
• Each click is actually a person..not a click.  Each non-click is also a person.  We are interested in engaging all people within our audience.  Clicking does not qualify you or disqualify from my consideration as a marketer.

I hate the click.

But I got this great click-through-rate on one of my PPC campaigns by making some changes to the offer and ad copy.  Let me tell you about it.