IAB 2025: Why 60% of CTRs Mislead Marketers

A 2025 IAB report just confirmed what we all kind of know: nearly 60% of marketers are still obsessing over click-through rates. The problem is, this reliance on an easy-to-track metric means most campaigns are flying blind, with no real idea if they’re connecting with customers or just generating empty traffic. So how do we get beyond this and start measuring what actually matters?

The Illusion of the Click: Why a High CTR Can Be Misleading

That recent IAB report showing 60% of us still lean heavily on click-through rates (CTR) isn’t just a statistic, it’s a huge problem. A click just signals a moment of curiosity. It says nothing about the quality of that interest, whether the person found what they needed, or if they were even the right person to begin with. I’ve personally seen campaigns with a 5%+ CTR deliver exactly zero conversions because the ad copy was so broad it pulled in everyone but the target customer. They clicked, sure, but they had no intention of buying. This means a high CTR can easily hide a broken targeting strategy or a message that’s completely off, burning through ad spend and giving you a false sense of success. The click might’ve led to a real interaction, but we have to be honest about how often it’s just a digital drive-by.

Beyond Page Views: The Power of Time Spent and Scroll Depth

Page views are a starting point, but they tell you almost nothing about genuine engagement. A far better signal is time spent on page, especially when you pair it with scroll depth. In fact, a 2025 study from Nielsen put a number on this, showing that users who spend over 60 seconds actively looking at content are way more likely to remember the brand and actually consider buying. For our long-form articles or technical product pages, we’re looking for an average engagement time of more than two minutes and scroll depth of at least 75%. That shows real interest. Think about a campaign for a new B2B software. If you see people spending four minutes on your features page and scrolling all the way down to the case studies, that’s infinitely more valuable than 10,000 clicks that bounce in 10 seconds. It shows your content is hitting the mark, answering their questions, and pulling them deeper into the funnel. You can track this stuff pretty well with tools like Google Analytics 4, which lets you get granular with user behavior.

Sentiment Analysis: Unpacking the “Why” Behind the What

While metrics like time on page show us *what* people are doing, sentiment analysis gets us closer to *why*. Thanks to natural language processing, we can sift through huge amounts of messy data from social media comments, product reviews, and forums to get a read on the emotional tone around our brand. Tools like Sprout Social or Brandwatch can sort these mentions into positive, negative, or neutral buckets with over 85% accuracy. On a recent product launch, we watched positive sentiment on X (formerly Twitter) about one specific feature jump by 20% in the first two weeks. That told us our messaging for that feature was perfect, an insight no CTR report could ever give us. On the flip side, if you launch a campaign and suddenly see negative sentiment about customer service spike, you’ve got an operations fire to put out, no matter how many people clicked through to your support page. Not looking at this data is a great way to drive your brand right off a cliff.

Brand Mentions and Share of Voice: The Echo Chamber Effect

Real engagement isn’t just someone reading your content. It’s them talking about it later with a colleague. By tracking brand mentions and your share of voice against competitors, you get a solid (if indirect) read on your campaign’s real-world impact. When a campaign creates buzz and people start talking about it on their own, that’s a powerful signal it’s working. For instance, after we ran an interactive content series, Semrush showed us a 10% lift in unprompted brand mentions on industry forums and LinkedIn within a month. People weren’t just consuming the content, they were sharing and debating it, which gave us a ton of organic reach. Looking at share of voice tells you how much of the conversation in your industry you actually own. A good campaign should grow that slice of the pie, proving your brand is taking up more space in your audience’s mind. The question isn’t just about who sees your ad, it’s about who’s talking about you when you’re not in the room.

The Underrated Value of Direct Feedback: Post-Interaction Surveys

If you want to know what people really think, sometimes you just have to ask. Post-interaction surveys, deployed right after someone reads a blog post or watches a video, can give you incredible qualitative data. Yes, survey fatigue is a thing, but a short, sharp survey of 2-3 questions can get you what you need. We’ve found that throwing in a small incentive, like a discount code, can easily bump response rates from a typical 5% up to 15% or more. Asking things like “Did this content help you solve your problem?” or “Based on this, how likely are you to recommend our product?” gives you immediate feedback on whether your content is actually useful. After a recent educational webinar, a quick survey told us that 70% of attendees found the content “highly relevant” to their job, a segment that directly led to a 12% jump in demo requests. That kind of direct feedback is invaluable. It tells you exactly what’s working and what isn’t, straight from the source.

Challenging the Conventional Wisdom: The Myth of the “Viral” Metric

The industry’s obsession with “going viral” as the peak of creative success is a trap. A campaign that gets millions of views is exciting, but it often comes at the cost of meaningful engagement with the people who actually buy your stuff. What’s the real return on investment if those views are from people outside your target market, or if they’re sharing it as a joke that completely overshadows your product’s message? I’ve seen teams celebrate campaigns with massive reach that did absolutely nothing for the business’s bottom line. I will take deep engagement with 10,000 highly qualified prospects over a shallow, viral hit with 10 million random viewers any day of the week. We have to stop asking “how many people saw it?” and start asking “who cared, and what did they do next?” That means finally ditching vanity metrics like raw impression counts and focusing on things that point to real intent and business impact, like qualified leads or customer lifetime value.

It’s all about a balanced approach. You need the quantitative data like time on page and scroll depth, but you have to pair it with qualitative insights from sentiment analysis and direct customer feedback. When you understand what users are doing, why they’re doing it, and how they feel about the experience, you can finally build campaigns that drive real results and create customers who actually stick around.