Slashdot Mirror
The Death of the Click (axios.com)
Sara Fischer, writing for Axios: For the past 10 years, we've operated on the premise that the most important digital metric is the click that refers a person to a website. That click usually comes from a social distribution channel, like Facebook or Twitter, or a search engine, like Google or Bing. But according to industry experts, the click referral is becoming an idea of the past, soon to be replaced by content exposure. [...] Most publishers have designed their websites to measure user interaction through clicks, not scroll rates or time spent on stories. As the industry moves away from click-through rates (CTR's) as the most meaningful marketing metric, those publishers will have a difficult time justifying the effectiveness of their platforms for marketers.
Ads serve many purposes, not just to get eyes on a particular website. Go look at the printed newspaper models. Those are a lot better and give you better metrics.
Most of the click metrics tools (I use CrazyEgg.com) will give you the "heat" area of the pages too (according the scroll). Correct me if I misunderstood the subject.
Whoa! Sudden outbreak of common sense.
A lot of people are about to lose their jobs...
Perhaps it is marketing itself that is no longer effective. Everyone knows the dominant players in every major market and everyone intuitively understands they're just being sold to. Some tune them out and the others are just fed up with invasive, annoying ads and use adblockers.
Facebook has already had to restart advertising numbers multiple times.
WTF
That shouldn't be too difficult.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Sure, the hot, hip, up-and-coming fresh out of school marketeers will turn their noses up at clicks, but the old-school crew will stick by what they know. It's the same in all industries.
Either that article was very poorly written, or the author doesn't know what they're talking about. What, precisely, do they think is going to replace clicks? 'cause "passive scrolling" is pretty vague (and doesn't seem to me to meet the goal of advertising).
I also love the idea that Google Analytics made clicks popular. Because, y'know, this couldn't possibly have been a popular metric long before Google ever came on the scene...
I guess to the hipsters, the Internet starts with Google.
-- sigs cause cancer.
What you're looking for is "Cost Per Impression" (CPI):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_impression
It's been around at least as long as newspapers.
The Death of the Clickbait, that's what this story is.
Is there a metric for how quickly people click off a website when ads make it unusable?
Oh NO!! How will the social media marketing billionaires continue CRUSHING it???
Imagine this... marketing that actually figures out the actual preferences of consumers and only targets them with relevant content. Mind blown.
We'll make great pets
The linked article is almost as long as the /. post above. I'd vote down the story as "not the best" Seriously -- several build up paragraphs of text with a final conclusion of "passive scrolling" followed by a button "show less" --- this article can't be much less. it needs a "show more"
Suggests to me it is click spam that made it though /. filters. SEO bait.
I attended a conference almost a decade ago with a workshop titled "How Idiots Track Success". The idea that clicks were valuable is an invention of the advertising industry. Like almost everything else in the advertising industry, it is a commonly believed cliche based on plying a large thread of self-serving misinformation with a very thin thread of truth. The reason it continues to be used is that honest measures make it obvious that online advertising is not really all that valuable. That serves almost nobody.
Google came "onto the scene" in 1999...So they've been here almost the whole time.
Time began at 9/11. The American Empire will endure.
This click-bait title and story are fake news. Death of the click, please.
Have gnu, will travel.
What, precisely, do they think is going to replace clicks?
Video impressions and impressions in an "infinitely" scrolling timeline. From the featured article:
I guess to the hipsters, the Internet starts with Google.
Marketers once again want to get a brand name into the public's collective head to drive search traffic:
Delta of new client hosts month to month & year over year.
No one needs to know what led me to their site.
"Passive scrolling" is when you load up something like Facebook or Instagram, and you mindlessly scroll through your feed. These apps implement infinite scrolling, and every n-th post is actually an ad.
The article doesn't mention it, but I think one of the big drivers of the "death" of click through rates as a metric is brand advertising. Advertisers have started to view digital ads more as a long-term brand-building exercise (where brand exposure is all they want) instead of a short-term sales opportunity (where click-through rate rules).
I think since the 90s, brand exposure is all marketers have cared about for newspaper, radio and TV ads - no one measures any equivalent of CTR for those mediums. It's surprising to me that it took them so long to align their digital marketing strategies to this way of thinking. Perhaps having an easy way to measure a metric (in the form of Google Analytics) is the key driver for the adoption of that metric (rather than the usefulness of the metric itself).
Why it matters: Most publishers have designed their websites to measure user interaction through clicks, not scroll rates or time spent on stories. As the industry moves away from click-through rates (CTR's) as the most meaningful marketing metric, those publishers will have a difficult time justifying the effectiveness of their platforms for marketers.
Care to explain why publishers will have a "difficult time"? If it can be counted, they can count it. If it can't be counted, it's not a metric.
block div class="stackcommerce-widget scw-horizontal col4"
So it's year 16 according to the American calendar.
Scroll: death to Load More Stories button!
Indirect metrics follow the same cycle for decades. If it isn't the advertiser's actual BOTTOM line -- and it never is -- then the metric is indirect. And indirect metrics simply follow the very basic fad system: if it's common to see big numbers, the new way shows small numbers, and vice versa.
Views - 1 per viewing of an ad
Viewers - 1 per person per ad
Eyeballs - 2 per person per ad
Hits - 1 per object on the page
Pageviews - 1 per page
Impression Time - seconds per page read
Clicks - 1 per click of an ad
Click through rate - clicks per minute, per day, per month, per year, per thousand impressions
Conversions - per interaction
Walk-ins - warm lead
Buyer - actual money, top line
Profitable buyer - actual money, bottom line
The game is always to market your number as smaller, and hence more accurate and more meaningful than others, or to make people prefer your numbers because they are proportionately higher than other metrics. Big whoop.
My favourite example has got to be the groupon model. We'll bring more paying customers into your business. Good. They'll pay so much less that you'll actually lose money, but you'll have a new customer! Yeah, one who will never pay full price for anything, and will hop around from one loss-leader discount to another. Who makes money off of these customers? Oh yeah, groupon does, and no one else.
Let's do it again.
100 customers spend 100 seconds reading 90% of your article! No they didn't. They scrolled to it, took a phone call for a minute, and left it open. And they didn't understand what they read, so it really doesn't matter. And then, they didn't buy anything. Watch me care.
I would say what they are looking for is not cost per impression, but rather cost per ENGAGED impression. That is, making CPI actually mean something by noting how likely it was someone paid attention to your ad - like as they mentioned, scroll speed slowing to view the space an ad is in, or perhaps a mouse moving closer to an ad and lingering (a good sign they are paying attention).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The "Close Ad" link at the bottom of the m.SlashDot.org page is really tiny and nearly impossible for me to hit. More often than not, I miss the "close" and click on the ad or a link in the story. Using a stylus has helped, but those advertisers have to pay Slashdot and don't get any business from me.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Google Analytics came in 2005 when they bought urchin. There was plenty of online advertising going on before that, including the whole bubble.
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The best dooshbaggery I've seen yet are the websites that don't have scroll bars. To make the scroll bars visible, and enable navigation of the websites, you have to login or create an account.
I'm attempting to start a meme here. The Internet shall officially be known as the SHITnet, and TV, in all its fecal formats, shall officially be known as shiTV.
I do not know a person who do not use adblock of sort. It is amusing to me to see new kinds of metrics invented for ads that people do not see.
It's old news, no matter what you want to call it.
I think since the 90s, brand exposure is all marketers have cared about for newspaper, radio and TV ads - no one measures any equivalent of CTR for those mediums.
Well, not entirely. For newspapers, ad coupons are the equivalent of clicks. For radio and TV, it's "go to the website and enter $PROMO_CODE into the box to get a discount."
Just happened to me. I had to choose between two brake pads, centric which i had never heard of, and monroe which is literally everywhere with their yellow ads. I ususally choose based on price for most things, but in this case, both pads were within 2 dollars of eachother, so i went with the more well known brand.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
From someone who is in the business.
CPI payout is so absurdly low you'll starve trying to make money on it. CPC pays depending on a wide number of factors.
Marketing is less and less about "brand awareness" and more and more about Cost per Acquisition and Cost per Conversion. This is probably what the original poster was thinking about. The idea that you track the content a person views is very much last decade, when everyone was going about saying things like "Content is King" and we needed to track people's "Content Journeys". The idea was that you could trigger actions (email sends, different ads, etc.) based on people's consumption of content - Amazon was and is the king of this. But for all the hoopla and money spent it really didn't increase conversion that much.
The idea that you can micro-target people - particularly geo targeting - is the hot buzz at the moment. The next revolution will probably be beacons on Bluetooth that micro target your mobile device within a few hundred yards. There's also the idea that you can be micro targeted based on ALL your digital interactions, but nobody has perfected this quite yet as it requires that your input (the things you write) is analyzed.
For products where the marketing funnel begins and ends with search, traditional marketing is completely dead.
And for those of you who think you're smarter than "marketers" I urge you to join the profession, you'd be quite surprised at what a science it actually is.
Murphy was an optimist
It was last updated in 2005 (it uses flash) but shows interfaces that can easily substitute the click.