Are clicks a good advertising KPI?
No. Aside from a few obvious tactics like paid search and native, there is ample evidence to avoid optimizing your advertising for clicks.
- Doesn't drive sales — Comscore and Nielsen have run studies, finding zero correlation between clicks and conversions.
- Truncates the audience — Another study found that 8% of internet users account for 85% of all display ad clicks. It's a bit old and display only, but it's just one part of the argument, so stay with me. This suggests that there are people who click on ads a ton and people who don't. Optimizing for clicks tells the algorithms to only show your ads to the people who click a lot.
- Increases cost — Click optimization costs more than brand campaigns (higher CPM) and converts worse than conversion campaigns (lower ROI). This is likely a combination of smaller audience and platforms charging more for outcomes (e.g. sales, clicks). Ultimately, it's bad at brand, bad at conversion, good at wasting money.
- Attracts bots — Bots click on ads at a higher rate than humans, causing the algorithms to optimize for more bots. (i.e. wasting money)
- Eliminates effective tactics — Builds trust in a metric that some of the highest return media (e.g. TV/CTV) cannot deliver on because it doesn't drive clicks. This creates an illusion that those channels should be excluded in favor of something more "trackable" which hurts or in many cases, entirely kills, your return on investment.
- Enables bad measurement — Enables a case for attribution (GA, MTA, etc.) as a source of truth, which is really bad (see Is multi-touch attribution good for anything at all?)
In short, it's expensive, ineffective, and distracting. Is there any more to say? I've already explained why you should ditch the mid-funnel section of your media plan, so let's throw clicks a going away party also and focus on better metrics…literally any other metric in the short term, but you should be thinking about running experiments to figure out which one correlates best to business outcomes. If you want to talk about your campaigns and get a recommendation for that short term metric, get in touch! I'm happy to help you through this bump in the road.