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.
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.
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.
That shouldn't be too difficult.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
While these new metrics might make more sense than measuring clickthroughs, I still don't see how this will achieve the objective. Time spent on a page or how deeply I scroll down an article is no indication of how likely that corporation is to separate me from some of my money.
I think TV has been advancing toward this point for a long time, but the Internet is overtaking it quickly -
The core problem is that there's just way too much low quality content out there. There's an avalanche of TV channels, websites, blogs, zines, etc - a mountain of content for every eyeball walking the earth and more. But 99.99% of the content is nothing that anyone would actually pay money for.
Clickthroughs allowed temporarily the parasitic existence of clickbait sites and fake news sites ad infinitum.
But we are getting to the point where people realize that there are about 5 TV channels they ever really want to watch, and about 5 websites they would care if they had to live without, and even fewer that they want to pay for.
The problem is not the metrics. You're going to get what you measure.
The problem is really that nobody is making anything that the general public thinks is worth paying for.
Clicks are often bogus thanks to incompetent web designers who don't pre-allocate real estate, thus causing pages - and clickpoints - to bounce up and down madly as content arrives. And, incidentally, making it harder to read the primary content.
Auto-playing audio/video metrics are even worse. I'll often close a page immediately if something starts making unsolicited noises and in many cases will never return to the site again, much less the article in question. But chances are that the offending content has already logged as "seen" thanks to buffering. I didn't see, if, I fled from it, and the fact that it was delivered to me unwanted doesn't make me a biuyer.
Time spent on a page or how deeply I scroll down an article is no indication of how likely that corporation is to separate me from some of my money.
I think the advertisers would disagree with you on that. A big goal of advertising is simple brand-recognition. The longer they can keep their brand in front of your eyes, the better. I believe that they believe this works.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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.
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:
Except past a certain point, it becomes over exposure to the point of the brain just filtering out the brand advertisement as noise. The target then is never even consciously aware that the brand even had an ad there to begin with.
If they try to bypass this with things like audio or flashy graphics, then it crosses the threshold into annoyance status. In which case the target is irritated by the brand, and actively or passively avoid it. (Actively by muting the audio, or moving their eyes away from the ad. Passively by choosing a competitor when the brand name comes up later. A.k.a. A choice between /cola type 1/ one fast food joint and /cola type 2/ at another, neither is being promoted directly, but the irritated target may subconsciously choose the fast food joint that has the competitor just because they want to avoid the brand that irritated them.)
There is such a thing as over-advertising a brand, and yes it has negative consequences if you do so.
No one needs to know what led me to their site.
Clicks are often bogus thanks to incompetent web designers who don't pre-allocate real estate, thus causing pages - and clickpoints - to bounce up and down madly as content arrives. And, incidentally, making it harder to read the primary content.
A few times I had to turn off my ad blocking and script blocking, I was shocked at just how awful most people have it. Got to the site, started loading, saw what I wanted, then BOOM! it disappears! Scroll around to find it again, and its like playing cat and mouse. So unless I really really really need it, screw it.
The present day web has become unusable without some serious blocking.
Auto-playing audio/video metrics are even worse. I'll often close a page immediately if something starts making unsolicited noises and in many cases will never return to the site again, much less the article in question. But chances are that the offending content has already logged as "seen" thanks to buffering. I didn't see, if, I fled from it, and the fact that it was delivered to me unwanted doesn't make me a biuyer.
Exactly. Newsletter popups, that metric you described, all bad, all either ignored, or telling me which product I will avoid. And I have no doubt that the ad industry lies to their customers, giving them a false idea of how many people are seeing or bypassing the ads.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"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.
[the advert] crosses the threshold into annoyance status. In which case the target is irritated by the brand, and actively or passively avoid it.
Agreed.
Some brands I avoid (in the UK) because of annoying ads - Karcher (pressure washing kit), Quality Street (chocolates), Microsoft (lots of other reasons to avoid them too), GoCompare (insurance), Blackthorn (cider).
Knowing how expensive advertising is, if a brand is heavily advertised I know that less money is going on the quality of the product itself.
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.
Knowing how expensive advertising is, if a brand is heavily advertised I know that less money is going on the quality of the product itself.
Or: "Nobody will buy this stuff [at our price point] unless we advertise."
227-3517
^^^^ This is it exactly. But in my case, 2 channels (Amazon and Netflix).
The rest could mostly go offline tonight and I wouldn't notice until one of the few websites I visit reported on it.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
A few times I had to turn off my ad blocking and script blocking, I was shocked at just how awful most people have it.
Bingo.
After several months of using Adblock I had occasion to use someone a friend's PC without Adblock....and I was blown away at how polluted the average web page is. Just loads of shit and ads and banners and fuck all. Ewwwwwwwwww. And it was slooooooooow as shit because of the megabytes of extra crap being loaded.
So I said, "Hey, wanna see something cool? There's this thing called 'Adblock', I think you'll like it...."
It's been over a year now and my friend still hasn't stopped thanking me.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I make a list of advertisers that annoy me and make a point to go to their competitors.
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
So I said, "Hey, wanna see something cool? There's this thing called 'Adblock', I think you'll like it...."
It's been over a year now and my friend still hasn't stopped thanking me.
I've "fixed" many people's computers by installing Adblock. They were ready to buy another computer because they though the dropoff in speed was due to age. Same result - Happy people.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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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Well said, but not every ad is meant to be converted to a sale right away. Often, it's to create or preserve brand recognition so that when you do make a purchase, you're likely to choose their brand over one you've never heard before or haven't seen as prominently.
Web ads were often broken down by impressions (did you see our ad), click-throughs (did you click to learn more or buy), and sales from tracking that click-through (a conversion of the ad into real money). An actual conversion/referral purchase gets the biggest bucks, but the others have some value to the marketer. Marketing departments have x amount of dollars and access to vast databases of consumer behavior to help them find their target market. If an ad network has profiled you according to which sites you visit, what you've purchased in the past, where you live, what your search terms are, etc etc... it knows enough about you to display ads that companies paid for you to see because they decided you're part of their target market or potential target market. Just having your brain register their logo is worth something to them. Marketing departments generally have to spend their budgets wisely, yet also completely to justify their existence... so, they spend the big bucks on stupid things like sports arena branding and Superbowl ads to get major mindshare, but then they spend some on other TV and radio, and the rest on newspaper and internet. Pennies per impression for ads.... it's not terribly expensive for multinational corporations.
I largely agree with your post, but keep in mind that separating you from your money immediately isn't their primary goal, and separating you from your money in general may not even be their goal. You might watch a commercial or see an ad that you find interesting and pass that message along to someone else who will be glad to pay money for the product or service -- and you just disseminated their message for them because you enjoyed their silly/unusual ad.
As an aside, my parents love the Allstate commercials with Mayhem in them. They'll never use Allstate as they love their Nationwide insurance rep. But, they'll talk about those commercials at church and spread awareness which keeps Allstate's name high in customer awareness as well as portrays them in a positive light.
It isn't just ad-blocking, though. Tat-heavy ads mess with your bandwidth, but a lot of the ping-ponging comes from not pre-allocating space for legitimate things to come. If you simply put an image tag on a page, an initial space may be computed, but if the actual image isn't the exact same size, then the page layout has to be updated once the true image pixel occupancy is known. Simply putting the image tag in a fixed-size DIV can mitigate this. So can putting WIDTH/HEIGHT attributes on image tags, although I've personally seen bad matchups where the browser burned a lot of resources re-scaling to a different final size.
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
I've "fixed" many people's computers by installing Adblock. They were ready to buy another computer because they though the dropoff in speed was due to age. Same result - Happy people.
Computers don't get slow with age. That is a mistake microsoft teach them . . .
You do know that many people think that they do. It is just a misinterpretation of Moore's Law.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And I have no doubt that the ad industry lies to their customers, giving them a false idea of how many people are seeing or bypassing the ads.
You've hit the nail on the head with that line.
I'm skeptical about the actual effectiveness of advertising on consumers on the whole, but the ad industry has been extremely effective in selling advertising to companies. That is apparently where advertising actually works and I bet the ad mongers are just as unscrupulous in their dealings with their clients as they are with the public.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
You've hit the nail on the head with that line.
I'm skeptical about the actual effectiveness of advertising on consumers on the whole, but the ad industry has been extremely effective in selling advertising to companies. That is apparently where advertising actually works and I bet the ad mongers are just as unscrupulous in their dealings with their clients as they are with the public.
That reminds me of the old saying about fishing lures. Supposedly to catch fish, they are designed to catch fishermen.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
Before he gets back to the start city. Because the route was too long due to inefficient computation.