No clicky no more

July 9, 2001 11:31 AM

No clicky no more On Monday the finance Web site will stop providing "click through" rates to its advertising clients and will urge them to consider other ways of measuring the effectiveness of their online ads. In shifting the focus away from click-throughs, MarketWatch is trying to convince companies that their online ads work by building general brand awareness even when the consumer does not actually click the ad to get more information.
posted by keith (16 comments total)

The problem is that they need some metric by which to judge advertisements. It really doesn't matter whether click-throughs measure the ad effectiveness 100%. It's well accepted that TV audience measurement is not based in reality, but in lieu of a better metric, we use what we have.
posted by fleener at 11:52 AM on July 9, 2001

Next step: persuade advertisers that online ads work by building general brand awareness even when the consumer does not actually see the ad. Oh man, we're so close to winning...
posted by jfuller at 11:53 AM on July 9, 2001

Good move on their psrt, hope other publishers follow suit. The little thing I came up with is sort of a hard grab of the eyeballs to ensure someone's seen an ad - may not be the answer, but maybe things are going down the right road again... and that would be a great thing....
posted by owillis at 12:04 PM on July 9, 2001

(closing italics)
posted by youhas at 12:19 PM on July 9, 2001

Honestly, I'd agree with that stand-point, that web-ads create "brand awareness". Thanks to running a website for 2 years, I am now aware of companies that I can purchase toilets from, have a barrel of rum delivered to my front door by, or even procure free condoms from -- no more ZipLocs for the D-man....
posted by Dark Messiah at 12:39 PM on July 9, 2001

owillis, the problems i saw with those ads though was, with the example i saw (which i assume is what the ad would look like), 10 seconds was just way too long, plus it took control away from the user by fullscreening the window...
posted by lotsofno at 12:44 PM on July 9, 2001

So, does "no more ZipLocs" refer to the toilets, the barrell of rum, or the condoms?
posted by starvingartist at 12:44 PM on July 9, 2001

"The problem is that they need some metric by which to judge advertisements."

Sure. Pageviews. Or imageviews, whatever.

It's easy enough to load the image indirectly through a script, and have that script count the number of times someone's loaded up the image. In fact, a little more programming will keep track of either IP addresses or a cookie (yeah, yeah, I know, doubleclick et al) and get an even better impression of the real number of views.
posted by CrayDrygu at 1:12 PM on July 9, 2001

I've always felt clickthoughs were unfair to websites. Its not like advertising clients get to pay TV or radio stations only for the amount of customers that go to the store.

Sites were cheapening their value -- not being compensated for branding, which in many cases is where banners are more effective because people look at them but don't click because they want to stay on the page they are on.

Having said that, is this really the market to be demanding anything of advertisers?
posted by brucec at 1:16 PM on July 9, 2001

eYada is shutting down at the end of the day. Nobody will buy ads on their streams.
posted by aaron at 1:40 PM on July 9, 2001

At a newspaper website I used to work at, we used to click on our advertisers' banner ads to increase the clickthrough ratio - it got annoying to do it manually so we just ran some perl scripts to take care of it for us.
posted by panopticon at 1:56 PM on July 9, 2001

lotsofno: It's still in beta, I'm trying to get feedback from people on the optimal time/size.
posted by owillis at 2:00 PM on July 9, 2001

Page views are a worse metric because of widespread abuse by web site owners. For example, launching multiple pop-up windows. It casts the net too wide. If I were an advertiser I'd want a narrower, rather than broader, metric.
posted by fleener at 2:45 PM on July 9, 2001

I would not be opposed to two tiny checkboxes in the corner of an ad... "like this ad" and "dislike this ad" that do NOT take you away from the site you are on. The combination of raw pageviews and some like/dislike ratio could be useful to advertizers and if it was on a site I really liked, like this one...I would prolly let them know my like/dislike on most of the ads.

dP
posted by darkpony at 3:15 PM on July 9, 2001

"Page views are a worse metric because of widespread abuse by web site owners."

Not views of the webisite's pages, views of the ads. If a site pops up three windows when you visit it, should that count as four page views? Not really, not. If they each have an ad banner in them, should they all count as adviews? Sure.
posted by CrayDrygu at 4:40 PM on July 9, 2001