ReveNews
Clicks Are Even Worse Measurements Than We Previously Believed
MediaPost has a wrap-up of an interesting new study from data compiled by StarCom, Tacoda and comScore emphasizing the apparent fact that relying on click-throughs as a reliable indicator of performance is not so wise:
Research by Starcom USA, behavioral targeting firm Tacoda, and comScore found that the 6% of the online population accounting for most of the click-throughs skews toward male Internet users ages 25 to 44 with household income under $40,000.
The study also found that their heavy clicking did not reflect high spending levels offline. They were also more likely to visit auction, gambling and career sites. The findings suggest that high click-through rates don’t necessarily boost branding campaigns.
“While the click can continue to be a relevant metric for direct response advertising campaigns, this study demonstrates that click performance is the wrong measure for the effectiveness of brand-building campaigns,” said Erin Hunter, executive vice president at comScore, in a prepared statement.
As people like Wayne Porter have been insisting for years, the click as a reliable metric seems to be on the way out the door (if it’s not there already) once direct performance and brand marketers realize its impotence and potential for easy abuse.
When I first entered the wild west world of email marketing and publishing years ago, CPC offers were the rage and you could do pretty well with an offer paying out $.06 a click targeted to the right demographic. Even then, we knew that this was a short shelf life game, and that turned out to the be the case as many direct response companies relying on CPC’s had a high burn rate and left many publishers without a paycheck.
However, the bigger issue is for Google. Google’s lifeblood at the moment is the ability to leverage the click in a highly automated, scaled and contextual fashion. What do findings such as this (which surely Google already knows) as well as the continual blind-eye towards off shore clickfraud operations mean for advertisers that rely on hefty AdWords budgets for traffic and conversions or who themselves leverage PPC agencies that promise returns based on a click measurement?
I still stick to my assertion that Google, etc will move away from both CPC and eventually CPA in favor of a more dynamic and flexible attention metric. It’s still the early days for that eventual change, but with more and more reports and findings about the lack of current direct response metrics to adequately measure traffic, intent and conversions, the attention economy is almost here.
Thanks to Converseon’s Jeff Doak for the link to the MediaPost post.
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