What is a Viewthrough Conversion and Why its Important
In this month’s article, we explore what a viewthrough conversion is and why its the most important element of advertising you didn’t realise.
A viewthrough conversion can be defined as a tracked action taking place without a user clicking on any form of advertising material you present to them.
Rather formal isn’t it?
So why does this occur?
There are 3 core reasons we feel this is happening more often in the present day and why it is the primary method display helps businesses attract customers.
We are becoming much more wary of advertising. From the early days of the internet with horrible sidebar advertising and trojan horses, viruses, worms and misleading information, internet users are understanding more and more that clicking on adverts could be dangerous.
They are also becoming more savvy – generally people are more comfortable with taking themselves to the destination you’re asking them to go to. It makes them feel safer knowing that they are in control of their online activities.
The stages to purchase have changed. One of the major changes we have noticed in the online ecosystem is the role authority and reviews have on people’s decision-making. Prospects are far more likely to navigate themselves to a search engine to read other people’s thoughts on your business and it’s offering than ever before.
The collective weight of all of these factors means that the way you must think about engaging with people and most importantly, thinking about how you measure their engagement with you and your business must also change.
Google helps us prove it. In 2018, Google’s average click-through rate across all of its Display advertising mediums in the US was:
0.02%
That is 1 click in every 5 thousand impressions. Pretty damning.
That does not however mean that Display advertising doesn’t work. It means that it must be measured differently. So what should you do?
The most important thing is tracking. Being able to track or at least demonstrate that these maturing user behaviours are taking place within your advertising efforts is critical. It will help you to understand the effects the different forms of advertising you run is having. We often encounter businesses with the below:
“We ran Display and it didn’t work. When we looked in our Analytics tool we saw very little influence on our site traffic from it”.
This is highly typical for a single reason: Most Analytics tools are not configured to track Viewthrough journeys.
The method of sourcing where a user came from on popular analytics tools comes from the referrer URL that user comes to the site from and vast database of mapping what sort of source that is, neatly broken out for you to look at.
Which is great if you run only click-based advertising mediums. Not so great given the above.
Given the importance of what Display can do for your business and what we have just run through above, making sure you look at Display advertising in the right lens is critical. Get that bit right and you’ll unlock the power of Display advertising and be ready to start scaling your business to new heights.