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Businesses The Internet News Technology

The Death of the Click (axios.com) 129

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.
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The Death of the Click

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  • by Parker Lewis ( 999165 ) on Monday February 20, 2017 @01:14PM (#53901309)
    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.
    • Why does this not infuriate people? Why do web browser designers even expose capability of browsers to do this kind of tracking even if its anonymous? It causes nothing but trouble. It gets used in inappropriate ways and is also used as justification to get more from users. If it doesn't exist at all we can all go back to the web being like a newspaper or magazine. Where advertisers know their fucking place and buy advertising on the CHANCE that you will read and get out of this stupid fucking notion that t

      • by Anonymous Coward

        You can turn it off by not sending them that data.

        It's your computer sending that data to them in the first place. So... don't.

        Don't feel like you need to do what everyone else is doing.

      • by H3lldr0p ( 40304 )

        I'm not certain if your questions are rhetorical or not but I feel as though you should already know the answer to all of it is simply money.

        That's the why of anything got built the way it did wrt browsers and so forth. I mean there is a colorful history and complex humans behind it all, but a lot of the motivation comes back to money and what it moves in our society.

        And if you think advertisers actually left things up to chance before, you would be mistaken. Magazines were invented to get into niches to ad

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Why can't we have a simple permission system for this? "This web page wants to use features that can be used to monitor your activity on this site. Only click "allow" if you trust the page and wan to use these functions."

          Sure, some idiots will click "allow" on anything, but it's fairly effective for things like location data and webcam access.

          It would be nice if browsers had APIs for controlling Javascript and other web technology access with a bit finer grain than "on/off" too.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Heat maps just make me wonder how on earth people are browsing. When I go to a webpage, assuming I'm there to read, the first thing I do is shove the mouse somewhere else (ideally a second monitor, if not just off he side somewhere) and use cursor keys *because they don't overlay an irritating pointer over what I'm trying to read, and are more effective for moving up and down a bunch of text*. Do people really look with their mice???

  • by epyT-R ( 613989 ) on Monday February 20, 2017 @01:14PM (#53901313)

    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.

    • I think there is some real truth to this. People are so constantly and aggressively marketed to that they have lowered their blast shields, and actually fight against being influenced by it.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Fuck the marketers, they should all die in a fire.

        They have taken an invention that had the potential to educate and uplift every single person on the planet, and turned it into just another medium to throw advertising in our faces.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Chill out. This particular invention is powerful enough to do both.

        • > Fuck the marketers, they should all die in a fire.

          Marketers and Lawyers would be a good start -- but sadly that wouldn't really change anything. :-/

          I really wish we could ban all forms of commercial advertising.

          Advertising pollutes our spaces -- both physical and virtual.
          It disrespects our time.
          All for the sake of profit.
          Greed is the cancer that destroys everything good about the world.

          Have we really become such a stupid species that we let blatant propaganda and hyper commercialization of product plac

    • Clicks let people actually see a quantifiable effect from their advertising (flawed as it might be). That is a lot harder with things like TV commercials and print ads.

      IMO, those commercials and ads had become very over-valued because they couldn't really be measured. Especially when the people selling ad time/space talk up "brand recognition" and similar effects as the major value in buying their time/space.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        There needs to be more research done on anti-advertising, i.e. ads that make people buy less of something by accident or by design.

        I find a lot of advertising to be patronising, unfunny and irritating to the point where I avoid those brands. I come to associate my annoyance with the brand, not just the ad.

        I wonder if they can be weaponized. Obviously trademarks are an issue, but maybe you could "de-program" people to not buy specific things. It can certainly be done generally, for example with minimalist ho

    • You really think most Americans know that they are being sold to? Diamond rings, the latest iPhone, three cars per family, the list goes on and on. Americans are really good at one thing: buying whatever our corporate overlords tell us we can't live without. The common man even willingly takes part in the marketing, retweeting things, liking posts, etc.

      It's not just things either. Look at policies that have been sold to us through the years: the mortgage interest deduction, unforgivable student debt, tippin

  • That shouldn't be too difficult.

  • by ZenShadow ( 101870 ) on Monday February 20, 2017 @01:24PM (#53901369) Homepage

    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.

    • Google came "onto the scene" in 1999...So they've been here almost the whole time.
      • Google Analytics came in 2005 when they bought urchin. There was plenty of online advertising going on before that, including the whole bubble.

    • What, precisely, do they think is going to replace clicks?

      Video impressions and impressions in an "infinitely" scrolling timeline. From the featured article:

      Marketers are starting to attribute marketing success towards content exposure that drives you to click something, instead of the click itself. Two key formats increase content exposure: video and passive scrolling.

      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:

      "a lot of work is done to get you to type something into a search bar to begin with," AdRoll

    • by afgam28 ( 48611 )

      "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

      • by tsqr ( 808554 )

        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."

  • by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Monday February 20, 2017 @01:24PM (#53901371)
    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.
    • 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).

  • I'd like to see (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fabioalcor ( 1663783 ) on Monday February 20, 2017 @01:33PM (#53901435)

    The Death of the Clickbait, that's what this story is.

  • by jetkust ( 596906 ) on Monday February 20, 2017 @01:39PM (#53901455)
    Is there a metric for how quickly people click off a website when ads make it unusable?
  • by Anonymous Coward

    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.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      That's a brilliant idea. I'm imagining maybe what if we voluntarily put our consumer preferences into our browsers and that was delivered to the advertisers? For example, I'm always in the market for the next tech gadget, I'm always looking for fun toys for my kids, and if anyone invents things that will make my wife's tolerance of me easier with less of her yelling, I'm up for all those things. Send me what you got !!!! I want to buy it !! If I could put that into my browser and deliver it to every

    • marketing that actually figures out the actual preferences of consumers and only targets them with relevant content.

      You mean like when I search for something on Amazon and I get shown ads for the same stuff when I visit my local newspaper's website? That kind of irrelevant garbage intrusion on privacy?

  • by ripvlan ( 2609033 ) on Monday February 20, 2017 @01:44PM (#53901485)

    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.

    • by tomhath ( 637240 )
      Not only short and non-informative, but makes nonsense assertions like this:

      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.

  • ... it was Clack [wikipedia.org] that died.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    No one needs to know what led me to their site.

  • block div class="stackcommerce-widget scw-horizontal col4"

  • by holophrastic ( 221104 ) on Monday February 20, 2017 @05:49PM (#53902719)

    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 "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.
  • 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 tra
  • It was last updated in 2005 (it uses flash) but shows interfaces that can easily substitute the click.

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