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.
Re:CTR was NEVER a good metric (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:CTR was NEVER a good metric (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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[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.
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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."
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^^^^ 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.
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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 purchas
moroe brake pads (Score:2)
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.
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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 ha
Re:CTR was NEVER a good metric (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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, althou
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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.
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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.
Sounds like old news... (Score:3)
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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
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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.
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It also uses cpu, several tabs all constantly polling the mouse.
Mouse polling doesn't work like that. Only your active window will be polling. That still sucks, but it's not every tab.
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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
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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.
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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???
Maybe people are oversaturated (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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.
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Chill out. This particular invention is powerful enough to do both.
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> 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
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The advertisers would disagree..
Sure the advertisers disagree, or they'd fire themselves.
A few brands in the past thought this and stopped advertising. "People" forget quickly - and even more quickly when a competitor keeps advertising.
Not necessarily. For example in the UK (and maybe the World) Stihl is the best brand of outdooor machinery. But I have never seen an advert for Stihl in the media. Yet they dominate the professional market because of their reputation which people do not "forget".
1 - People are born and people die.
Adverts are not the only way that people learn of a brand. They learn from other users, reviews on the web (amateur and profesional) and simply Googling for makers' web sites. If
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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.
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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
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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
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Before he gets back to the start city. Because the route was too long due to inefficient computation.
They just have to become better bullshitters (Score:1)
That shouldn't be too difficult.
A piece about content... without content. (Score:4)
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.
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Google Analytics came in 2005 when they bought urchin. There was plenty of online advertising going on before that, including the whole bubble.
Brand impressions in video and timelines (Score:2)
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:
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"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
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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."
CPI - "Cost Per Impression" (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_impression
It's been around at least as long as newspapers.
No, something more advanced (Score:2)
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)
The Death of the Clickbait, that's what this story is.
H.I.T.S. (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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Advertisers don't want you to know this weird trick for stopping click-bait discovered by Wisconsin Mom. [youtube.com]
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The Death of the Clickbait, that's what this story is.
You simply won't believe how they did it!
Usabilty metric (Score:3)
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the bubble is popping (Score:1)
Oh NO!! How will the social media marketing billionaires continue CRUSHING it???
Marketing slowly sneaking up on common sense? (Score:2)
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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
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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?
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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?"
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Ditto. It's a huge waste of money for the advertiser. And when it comes to a router, if you buy one 3 years later it's going to be a different model.
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This. What I find hilarious is I buy an item online, let's use the new router ....... for the next 3-4 months I will see only adds for that item I'm happily using at home now.
You are lucky. 6 months ago I signed up a spamming company to a website for Thai Brides. Now ads for Thai brides keep popping on my screen. I have to shield the screen from my wife.
Shortest non-informative article I've ever read !! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
I thought ... (Score:2)
I strip the referer from all my requests (Score:1)
No one needs to know what led me to their site.
block an ad on this page (Score:1)
block div class="stackcommerce-widget scw-horizontal col4"
Bigger, smaller, bigger smaller, bigger (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Eyeballs - 2 per person per ad
I have a lazy eye, you insensitive clod!
I blame Slashdot mobile (Score:2)
Marketing 101 (Score:1)
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
http://dontclick.it/ (Score:1)
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