If you want to see us get fired up at SocialHP, all you have to do is mention Click-Through-Rates. It's been a topic of much heated debate since the inception of the company.

And after much debate, we've decided to remove CTRs from our site entirely and here's why:

Why Does that Matter?

Irrespective of which CTR calculation we decide to use, since these three platforms do not provide impression data - our CTR calculations would only be wild speculation.

Why the Debate?

Why is there such a heated debate around CTRs you might ask? Well, the main debate is philosophical. Should our tool be compared to a traditional PPC model? I think there is a strong argument that can be made for that. Our Media Points column represents an Earned Media calculation. So if our ROI outcomes are tied to conventional advertising analytics, then our CTRs should be calculated on the traditional PPC model for CTRs shown below:

When is the Ad Delivered?

One of the main question becomes, when is the ad considered to be "delivered". Is it considered delivered when it leaves our servers on SocialHP and is posted to the wall of the influencer or employee? Or is it considered "delivered" when the post leaves SocialHP (figure a) and is placed on the wall of the employee (figure b)?

Assuming the Google PPC paradigm for calculating PPC, figure a and figure b represent the traditional PPC model where an ad is delivered to an audience (which would include your own employees).

The reason some people internally believe that this is the accurate way to measure for CTR is because as the product owner your costs are tied to the delivery of the post from SocialHP to the employee wall. 

The second reasonable paradigm (that quite a few folks at SocialHP believe) is that the ad unit is considered delivered once it hits the wall of your employee and is served up to their followers and connections.

Is it Social Media?

So if it's no PPC, then it must be social, right?

As you well know, CTRs are not available on an individual profile-by-profile basis. Because of the business implication of CTRs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn only display CTRs on their advertising units and in the case of networks that support business pages, on those respective pages. 

The question is: is it fair to compare CTRs of pages built explicitly for business purposes versus profiles that your employees built for personal use? I think there is a pretty reasonable position you could take on either view.

Setting aside the philosophical debate there are also practical issues in calculating an accurate CTR for an individual social media profile.

From a social media perspective, your CTR would be calculated in a slightly different manner. It would be the number of followers or fans who saw your post divided by the number of times your post is shown. 

There are two key data points missing from this calculation, namely: number of followers and impressions.

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 Facebook turned off the friend_count endpoint for all 3rd party API providers. LinkedIn followed suit and similarly does not offer connection information for users that have more than 500 connections.

More importantly, as outlined at the top of this page, impression ratios for all three networks are a closely guarded secret.

Summary

Assuming you want to completely ignore the intrinsic built-in virality supported by employee advocacy tools and disregard that from your calculations - you'd be left with our second calculation option which is using the SMM version of CTR calculations.

In both cases, impressions and connection information is either not known or is dependent on self-reporting.

Given the fact that any CTR calculation based on incomplete information could be wildly inaccurate, we have made the difficult decision of removing CTRs site-wide.

Based on the accurate information we do have, we have decided to replace CTRs with a Clicks-Per-Post (CPP) calculation instead.