Clicking Is Not the First Choice

Clicking on an ad isn’t the first choice for people – even when they’re interested in the brand or company advertised. In fact, clicking is a minority choice people make, much to the detriment of downstream digital measurement efforts in Web Analytics or CRM platforms.

In a new study that looked at the desired ad actions among over 2,000 study participants, the lack of click intent was clear. Even among what was recently considered the most clickworthy channel – PPC search – clicks are far from a certainty.

In fact, Google’s Paid Search now ranks 5^th among channels and platforms in conjuring an ad click from interested consumers. Ahead of it are:

• TikTok at 42% ad click preference
• Instagram at 39% ad click preference
• Facebook at 38% ad click preference
• YouTube at 35% ad click preference
• Then Google Search at just 29% ad click preference

The “Zero-Click” world, while admittedly misnamed, is indeed changing the behavior typically seen in the traditional search world. Of course, Google is well aware of this preference, hence the shift to AI Search Mode and with AI Overviews taking prime real estate in most searches today.

Google, however, still stands atop the hill for discovery. In all other platforms included in the study, the number one or two answer for the preferred action to take when seeing an ad for an interesting brand or company was, indeed, to go to Google and conduct a search.

Whether or not that search ends in an ad click is unlikely, but it’s valuable traffic for Google none-the-less.

All of this points to a much more complicated view of advertising performance than most digital advertisers understand. In a Zero Click world where even Paid Search isn’t likely to drive a click as the preferred action, how can click-based measurement be trusted? And to be clear, click-based measurement INCLUDES Web Analytics like GA4 and CRM platforms like Salesforce. They feed on clicks to grade marketing investments. A false hope for years, becoming more fickle by the day.

But let’s pretend that’s what happens. The consumer clicks on an ad. Yet, for those increasingly rare clicks to receive “value” from a last-click platform, many more things have to go right. Often, they do not, thanks to another conflating issue we collectively call signal loss, brought about by years and years of increased privacy, regulation, and tracking technology prevention.

• <40% of people click on a paid ad
• Of those people, 30% end up converting on a different device
• Of those people, 20% of the conversions don’t get counted thanks to imperfect technology
• Of those people, and category-dependent, 30% won’t fit the system’s attribution window
• Which leads to “seeing” roughly 15% of click-based converters in the final count… certainly undervaluing marketing investments significantly

At the end of the day, even the people that WANT to click on an ad from a platform are very unlikely to get counted for that platform. Click-based attribution is a measurement travesty. It was always wrong in a search-heavy world, and now even more problematic in a Zero Click world. Smart advertisers are taking a different approach, putting click-based measurement in the small box it should stay in. Instead, they use advanced analytics like MMM or diminishing returns analyses. They deploy experiments and dark tests to validate impact. They triangulate and find much better answers to the question every company cares about. Not, “which click actions drove my volume?” but, “which ad exposures drove my volume?” Once the tools are in place to track the answers to that question, optimizations become much more helpful for driving business growth.