Success Rate - A New Digital Marketing Metric

Over the last few months, digital marketing professionals have had a lot to say about Google losing its momentum in search. Many articles on the Internet, written by leading digital marketing experts, have detailed Google's lack of reliability, reliance on content farms, and user dissatisfaction, in their critiques. Google has responded by unofficially declaring war on websites trying the cheat their system, by modifying their algorithm to make search more relevant and personal.

Recently, Hitwise, a global online competitive intelligence service, announced a statistic which digital marketing professionals need to study thoroughly. This statistic is called 'success rate'. Simply explained, success rate is the percentage of users that exited a search engine after running a search. Digital marketing professionals are always discussing how the power of search lies in its ability to provide relevant content that meets user needs. This statistic can help do just that.

However, most search engines are designed to offer users information about a particular search, without them having to click on a displayed link. For example, if an individual searches for the term 'London weather', the temperature and forecast for the next few days in the city is displayed above all other search results. Hence, a factor of variance should be allowed for such keywords, which do not require a searcher to leave Google to learn the answer.

When the success rate of various search engines was checked, it was noticed that Google has sizably improved its success rate since October 2010. Success rate of a search engine gives advertisers another digital marketing topic for discussion. Generally, most companies think of CTR as a sub-zero game, where a click means success, and no clicks mean failure. However, no one considers the fact that if they did receive a particular click, some other website on a search results page may have got it, as their content may have matched user intent better.

If this is right, then companies have two options:

The first option is to create a new metric called eCTR, which would measure their actual CTR when a searcher clicked somewhere on a search results page. This is helpful for digital marketing specialists in two ways - it allows them to know when they were preferred over other websites, and when no website could connect with a searcher's needs.

The trouble with the first option is that for it to work, there should be some mode to track impressions served, and get this data from the search engines. Also, the search engines would have to provide data of searches that resulted in no clicks for anyone. Hence, it is better to simply allow third-party ads to be served on search result pages, with modified digital marketing messages to give brands a second chance at collecting a click.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency and can be contacted on 020 8891 2077 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.

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