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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The worst part of the whole thing is that the ads following me around are more like. "I see you just bought some pillowcases, here's some more pillowcases you might be interested in." Except that's not really capturing the absurdity of the Amazon ads, since they follow me around AFTER I buy the thing, so it's more like you go back to Bed Bath & Beyond and the sales associate walks up and says "Oh, you bought these pillowcases last time you were here. Would you like to buy more pillowcases?"
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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...
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.