High Clickthrough Rate (CTR) as a KPI has evolved since the early days of search and programmatic. As DSPs presented more and more sophisticated tooling and algorithms, buyers had more freedom to explore different KPIs. That freedom has sparked imagination and unlocked innovation to help buyers fulfill their campaign goals.
But even with the evolution of high CTR, we know that the click still matters.
We know from a brand awareness standpoint that high CTR tells us when creatives are engaging and that if people aren’t clicking, something isn’t right. And for performance campaigns, clicks are an important intent-to-purchase factor for both manual optimization and training DSP algorithms to ramp up more quickly.
That’s why TripleLift launched our new Exchange Traded Deal: HiCLICK for Direct Display.
HiCLICK is a High CTR deal curated at the placement level. We first launched HiCLICK for Native inventory, but quickly saw how buyers responded well to the KPI and have since expanded the offering to include Direct Display. Although some in the industry may consider the KPI irrelevant, high CTR as a KPI is alive and well.
According to James Oyedele, TripleLift’s Sr. Product Manager for Deals, HiCLICK’s value matches the evolution of the click as a KPI:
While programmatic KPIs have matured to increasing complexity, clicks remain a vital indicator of audience engagement, and one of the strongest dimensions for optimization. These deals complement DSP optimization, decrease algorithm learning times and curate performant inventory in an efficient and re-usable way. This is why we feel HiCLICK deals can drive incremental performance for almost any campaign.
In fact, when TripleLift ran tests we found that when pairing HiCLICK for Direct Display with the DSP’s CTR goal we saw over 2x better CTR — with little impact to the CPM.
HiCLICK can be used to best suit a number of different campaign objectives.
There’s no hard and fast rule about when to use high CTR. However, we do have some recommendations on how to best let High CTR complement your campaign’s set-up.
| Use Case | How to Leverage |
|---|---|
| CTR is your primary KPI | Activate HiCLICK for lower funnel tactics |
| You’re launching a brand awareness campaign | Lean on HiCLICK to determine your creatives are engaging; use in A/B testing |
| Your campaign has a short flight | Use HiCLICK to see only the most performant inventory; your DSP may take more time to ramp up than your campaign’s flight, and this will help close any gaps. |
| You lean on manual optimization | Use HiCLICK to send you the most performant inventory and relieve you of manual lift |
| You value post-click conversions | Activate HiClick to maximize engagement and provide more insights for DSP CPA optimization |