Useless online metrics you might be tracking - iMediaConnection.com
Complete rates and recall
Correlation does not imply causation
There are a few reasons to buy pre-roll. It's creatively easy, it's familiarity to the broadcast TV structure appeals to less-adventurous clients, and you know you're getting complete views. Pre-roll generally gets about an 80 percent complete view rate, which is great, right? Well, it would be if complete rate were actually a proxy for recall. But there is no evidence that it is.
Even more basically, recall might not really be a valuable goal in the first place. It's measurable through surveys, but does recall get you any closer to intent to purchase? Creating recall seems to be important because buyers of brands are highly aware of the brands they buy. But is it that recall leads to purchase or merely that purchasers have high recall? There is, to my knowledge, no research that shows causation (rather than correlation) between recall and intent. That's the Rosser-Reeves Fallacy.
A timely conclusion
In case it appears that I'm suggesting the above metrics are meaningless, I'm not. I'm suggesting that they are meaningful, but only in the right context and when implemented honorably. Context shifts rather a lot from campaign to campaign, and honor is too often fleeting in this industry.
Is there a metric broad enough to be simply applied across lots of different types of campaigns? Well, I'm a big fan of engagement (though I think engagement rate is a poor metric because unless you're qualifying engagement rigorously, it's too easy to game). Engagement can often be measured in time spent. Of course, not all time is spent the same way, and some creatives, who know that success will be measured on time, play games like hiding the close button, which gets good results on the spreadsheet without helping the brand.
Assuming that your materials adhere to honorable best practices, time is a great metric. We've seen studies that indicate that increases in time spent correlate with increases in brand lift; the more time, the greater the lift (up to, I'm sure, a point of diminishing returns). With the right qualifiers and more research into how different modes of spending time should be valued, time might be the metric that can best normalize across ad types and publishers while being more immune to gamesmanship.
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