We recently introduced Clickshare as part of our Share of Voice Report. Clickshare adds a layer of meaning to the insights that you get from the six Impression Share columns. But what exactly does it mean and how should you interpret the data? We thought a story could serve as a metaphor.
Setting the Stage
These are the dramatis personae:
Our Hero: We start with Rick, the hero of our story. Rick is the archetype of the sociable fellow, young and single, educated and well groomed. Like many people his age, he is on the lookout for interesting company, for friendship or love or for a sociable conversation over a couple of drinks. But there seem to be a few hurdles to surmount before he can get there. What is Rick’s story?
The Competition: Other men like you who are looking at meeting women in the same bar you are in. In the real world, these are other advertisers competing in your space, who are going after your customers.
Target Audience: Women present in the bar that evening, who may or may not be interested in meeting with and talking to you. In the real world, these are your prospective customers.
The Bouncer: The first hurdle is this imposing man in a T-shirt that can barely contain his rippling muscles. Unless Rick can get past him, he is not even on the playing field. This man is the BingAds platform, and getting past him and into the bar counts as winning an impression.
Charming the Ladies
Now that he is in, we need to see if Rick’s got game. Does Rick have what it takes to charm the ladies? Well it doesn’t look pretty at first. But finally, Rick has some luck.
The next day, Rick gets to thinking, “How well am I doing?”
- Do I have the best game in town?
- Do I need to get flashier clothes?
- Should I buy the ladies more expensive drinks?
- What about my repertoire of jokes?
He wished he had a coach to who would tell him if his success rate is good compared to other men like him. As advertisers, that is what you also want to know. Are you doing better than your competition? What proportion of customers are clicking on your ads and how many are going with the competition?
Clickshare and You
This brings us to clickshare and why we think it could be an invaluable tool in your arsenal.
- Clickshare is a competitive view based on actual impact in marketplace –it tells you what percentage of the clicks in your market space you are capturing and how much you are losing out to the other guy(s)
- Clickshare is calculated by considering all the auctions you went up in (this is your market space), where there were finite number of prospective customers who clicked a certain number of times. Clickshare is the percentage of clicks that went to your ads – it is the share of the prospective customer’s mindshare and buying intent you captured
- ClickShare data should be seen in the context of Impression Share since it adds a layer of information about the actual performance of the ads with end users (in terms of ability to attract clicks as opposed to rivals).
Returning to the metaphor one last time to illustrate what the insights could be by analyzing clickshare numbers. For example:
Last month, Rick got into 20% of the bars in this town, but his success rate was 35% (of all the hook-ups that took place in all the bars Rick tried to enter irrespective of whether he got in to them or not)
- Rick’s takeaway: “I need to work on getting into bars, but once I am in, I rock!”
Last month, Mick got into 60% of the bars in this town, but his success rate was 8% (of all the hook-ups that took place in all the bars that Mick tried to enter irrespective of whether he got in to them or not)
- Mick’s takeaway: “The bouncers like me more than the ladies. Hmmm, is there a message here that I am missing ……”
What Your Clickshare Data is Telling You to Do!
As we noted above, ClickShare data should be interpreted in the context of your Impression Share. Listed below are a few example scenarios that you should be able to extrapolate from.
- Let’s start with a scenario where you have an win rate of 25% for impressions, and a clickshare of 27%. This means that you capture your fair share of clicks – your performance is about average in the marketplace. If you are getting a reasonable ROI on your clicks, you should try to boost your impression share by addressing issues that may be blocking it, be it budget or bid or relevance.
- If your Impression Share is 25% but your clickshare is only 7%, it indicates that customers are disproportionately passing you over and choosing to click on the competition. There are two reasons this could happen:
- You have a problem connecting with your audience. Your adcopy doesn’t appeal to them, or your brand is not trusted or you are competing against extremely strong players with established brands. You may need to rework your message or build your brand or do other things that increases your customers’ affinity to you. Here, attempting to increase your impression share by pouring in budget or boosting bids will likely not be too useful
- You get impressions, but they tend to be low down in the page. The average position for your ads is 4 or greater. We know that Searchers tend to click disproportionately on the top ads. Getting your ad to the top of the page increases the probability of click by an order of magnitude. In such a case, you should consider whether you wish to boost the bids on at least some of your strongest KWs to get them to serve high up on the page.
- Your Impression Share is 25% but your clickshare is 55%. You are getting more than your fair share of clicks. You are probably an extremely strong player, with great brand recognition and trust. There isn’t anything you need to do for now, but do keep monitoring your campaign performance so you are not caught off-guard should a strong rival emerge.
Running a Report to Get Clickshare
Getting clickshare starts with creating a share of voice report.
- Click on the Reportstab.
- Select Share of voice report from the Report list on the left pane.
- Select the View(unit of time) and Date range you want.
- Customize the list of columns in your report by clicking on ‘CHOOSE YOUR COLUMNS’. Check the box against ‘Click share (%)’ to add the column to the report output. You will find it with columns listed under ‘performance statistics.’
- Make any other required changes to the report setting such as the filter conditions or the list of columns selected.
- Click RUN to generate the report!
Thank you!
Ashwin