How Pinterest Upgraded CTR to Be a Far More Useful Engagement Metric
https://medium.comClickthrough rate falls prey to optimizing for clickbait and ignores other signals and position bias. In this post, we see how Pinterest is looking at additional data along with CTR to make a much more useful engagement metric.
They talk about the issues with basic CTR:
- Position bias: Ads higher up the page are more likely to be clicked, but this does not mean the user finds them more useful.
- Focusing on CTR leads to clickbait: Items with a high CTR may be “clickbaity” — they encourage the user to click but fail to give them anything useful.
- CTR ignores other signals: Hiding or Reporting of Ads give a strong signal of user’s dislike of an ad.
- Some things aren’t meant to be clicked: today’s advertisers may use different, less click-based formats, such as video, or be more interested in building brand awareness.
They started to look at things like
- a weighted average of different actions — Clicks, Hides, and Saves, among others — on the ads along with CTR
- average engagement rate on ads to that of the organic content in the spots before and after
- etc
