Oliver Leigh, Founder and CEO, Portal
Imagine spending millions on digital advertising only to discover that more than 90% of the people clicking through to your products leave almost immediately.
For many consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, this isn’t a hypothetical scenario. It’s a pattern we regularly encounter when we begin measuring campaign performance, with bounce rates often exceeding 90%. By bounce, we mean someone who clicks through to a retailer’s website and leaves within three seconds of the page loading.
That’s an extraordinary amount of traffic generating little meaningful engagement. Yet for years, CPG marketers have had very little visibility into what’s happening once consumers reach a retailer’s website.
And that lack of visibility has created a fundamental problem with how digital advertising is measured and optimised.
We’ve become very good at buying clicks
The problem isn’t necessarily poor creative, badly targeted advertising or a frustrating retailer experience. It starts much earlier, with what we’re asking advertising platforms to deliver.
For years, clicks have been one of the few measurable outcomes available to CPG brands running campaigns that direct consumers to third-party retailers.
Unlike with direct-to-consumer, where the customer’s activity can typically be followed from advert through to purchase, CPG brands on third-party retailers often lose sight of that customer the moment they land on the retail website. They know how many people clicked, but not necessarily whether those people looked at a product, added it to their basket or showed any genuine intention to buy.
So, they’ve optimised for the information they have. The trouble is that advertising platforms are extremely good at delivering against the objectives they’re given: tell Meta or TikTok to find people who are likely to click, and that’s exactly what their algorithms will do.
But someone who’s likely to click isn’t necessarily someone who’s likely to buy.
Over time, the industry has created a system that can look successful on a campaign dashboard while delivering very little commercial value. Traffic volumes might be increasing and cost-per-click might be falling, but neither signal tells you whether you’re reaching consumers who are genuinely interested in purchasing your products.
Not all clicks are created equal
This is where CPG marketing needs to change. Rather than treating every click as equal, brands should be looking at what consumers do once they arrive on a retailer’s website.
Do they stay on the product page? Do they explore the product? Do they add something to their basket? Do they progress towards checkout?
These behaviours tell us far more about purchasing intent than the initial click, and importantly, they provide the advertising platforms with better information to optimise against. When post-click ecommerce signals are fed back into platforms through conversion pixels or APIs, campaigns can begin identifying audiences more likely to engage with products rather than those who are just visiting a website.
This changes the objective from simply generating traffic to generating commercially valuable traffic. It also creates opportunities to improve retargeting, build more relevant audiences and make better decisions about where advertising budgets should go.
None of this requires brands to abandon their existing media channels or completely rethink their creative strategies; in many cases, the most important change is simply giving the algorithms better signals to work with.
Of course, reducing bounce rates doesn’t automatically mean increasing sales, and post-click engagement isn’t the same as proving incremental revenue. But it gives brands a much better foundation for understanding the quality of the traffic they’re buying.
It’s time to rethink what good performance looks like
The industry has spent years improving how it measures advertising delivery, from impressions and viewability to clicks and engagement. But for CPG brands, there’s still a significant gap between measuring whether an advert attracted attention and understanding whether it generated genuine shopping interest.
Closing that gap requires a change in how brands, retailers and advertising platforms approach measurement. Retailers and brands ultimately want the same thing: more consumers discovering and buying products. Better visibility into post-click behaviour can help achieve that without requiring brands to access retailers’ first-party customer data.
It also means rethinking what constitutes a successful campaign. A low cost-per-click might look impressive in a report, but it’s of little value if the majority of those consumers leave without engaging with the product.
If more than 90% of the traffic you’re paying for disappears within seconds, driving more clicks isn’t the answer. It’s time to start measuring what happens next.
Portal is a client of Bluestripe Communications, owned by Bluestripe Group, the publisher of Retail Media Age.
