Why 'last click wins' is utter b*****ks

Advertising Age published a fantastic article entitled 'Why the click is the wrong metric for online ads'.

I have outlined some of the key paragraphs below:

"Publishers have a lot to gain," said Steve Kerho, VP-analytics, media and marketing optimization at Organic. Mr. Kerho has been doing lots of analysis on how online-display ads affect search and conversions and found that in some cases, a display ad can increase a search ad's click-through rate 25% to 30%. If he had simply measured the clicks from search, he would have missed the display ads' influence.

John Squire, chief strategy officer of web-analytics firm Coremetrics, which today is launching a service that helps marketers give proper credit to their many online ads, likens it to an offline example: You're headed to the supermarket and on your way in you see the big sign in the window advertising ground round for $3.99 a pound. You need some anyway, so you buy it. In the online world, which measures the last ad seen, that sign alone would be given credit for your purchases in the store. But it's quite likely that you were going shopping in the first place because you saw something in the weekend circular that you wanted to buy or maybe you heard a radio ad. Under the last-ad-attribution model, the circular is worth, at worst, nothing, and at best far less than the ad for ground chuck in the storefront.

A ComScore research study called 'Wither the click', which studied 139 online ad campaigns by marrying data from its panel of U.S. internet users with shopper data, found online ads, even when they didn't result in a click, increased a consumer's likelihood of making a purchase at an advertiser's retail store by 17% and increased visits to a marketer's website by an average of 40%.

"Virtually any seller that's not a search engine or affiliate [network] is not getting the proper credit for their ads," said Esco Strong, market research manager at the Atlas Institute. "There's a disconnect in terms of the actual work that's delivering people through that [sales] funnel and the sale and there's a disconnect in how advertisers are measuring their ads and planning their campaigns."

Read the full article here: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=134787