A company called TidalTV has suggested that clickthrough rates (CTRs) on ads in online videos don’t provide as much insight as Web marketers would like to believe. According to a study by the video advertising solutions provider, in-video ad CTRs can be influenced by factors such as industry sector, demographics and even the day of the week. For instance, the finance industry had significantly higher CTRs than the travel or Web industries, indicating that comparisons across different categories can prove to be futile.

CTRs were also found to be considerably higher on weekdays than weekends, and 25- to 34-year-old users were far less likely to click on ads in videos than were less Web-savvy older and younger online video viewers. It may be just one study, but marketers might want to question the validity of activity-based metrics such as CTRs for determining the true performance of their online video ad campaigns.